r's place, in his father's very chair, was thus under the spell of
a woman whose child was nameless. He smiled grimly at the thought of
Auntie Hamps, of Clara, of the pietistic Albert! They were of a
different race, a different generation! They belonged to a dead world!)

"I shall tell you," Hilda recommenced mournfully, but in a clear and
steady voice, at last releasing her face, which was shaken like that of
a child in childlike grief. "You'll never understand what I had to go
through, and how I couldn't help myself"--she was tragically
plaintive--"but I shall tell you... You must understand!"

She raised her eyes. Already for some moments his hands had been
desiring the pale wrists between her sleeve and her glove. They
fascinated his hands, which, hesitatingly, went out towards them. As
soon as she felt his touch, she dropped to her knees, and her chin
almost rested on the arm of his chair. He bent over a face that was
transfigured.

"My heart never kissed any other man but you!" she cried. "How often
and often and often have I kissed you, and you never knew! ... It was
for a message that I sent George down here--a message to you! I named
him after you... Do you think that if dreams could make him your
child--he wouldn't be yours?"

Her courage, and the expression of it, seemed to him to be sublime.

"You don't know me!" she sighed, less convulsively.

"Don't I!" he said, with lofty confidence.

After a whole decade his nostrils quivered again to the odour of her
olive skin. Drowning amid the waves of her terrible devotion, he was
recompensed in the hundredth part of a second for all that through her
he had suffered or might hereafter suffer. The many problems and
difficulties which marriage with her would raise seemed trivial in the
light of her heart's magnificent and furious loyalty. He thought of the
younger Edwin whom she had kissed into rapture, as of a boy too
inexperienced in sorrow to appreciate this Hilda. He braced himself to
the exquisite burden of life.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett

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