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The following day, Victoria Stanhope, still thin, still pale and moving with slight awkwardness, paid a call upon Hester, who conducted her to Robert.
Dagmar had remained uncertain about the suitability of a young, single woman’s visiting in such circumstances, but when she saw Victoria, her shyness and her obvious disability, she changed her mind. And apart from that, the girl’s dress immediately proclaimed her lack of means or social position. The fact that she spoke with dignity and intelligence made her otherwise most agreeable. The name Stanhope was familiar to Dagmar, but she did not immediately place it.
Victoria stood on the landing beside Hester. Now that the moment had come, her courage failed her.
“I can’t go in,” she whispered. “What can I say to him? He won’t remember me, and if he does, it will only be that I rebuffed him. Anyway”—she gulped and turned, white-faced, to Hester—“what about my family? He’ll remember that, and he won’t want to have anything to do with me. I can’t—”
“Your family’s situation is nothing to do with you,” Hester said gently, putting her hand on Victoria’s arm. “Robert is far too fair to make such a judgment. Go in there thinking of his need, not your own, and I promise you, you will have nothing at the end which you can look back on with regret.” The moment she had said it, she realized how bold she had been, but Victoria’s smile prevented her from withdrawing it.
Victoria took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, then knocked on the door again.
“May I come in?”
Robert looked at her with curiosity. Hester had prepared him for the visit, naturally, and had been surprised how clearly he had recalled their one brief encounter over a year before.
“Please do, Miss Stanhope,” he said with a slight smile. “I apologize for the hospitality I can offer, but I am at a slight disadvantage right at the moment. Please sit down. That chair”—he pointed to the one beside the bed—“is quite comfortable.”
She walked in and sat down. For a moment her fingers moved as if to rearrange her skirts. The new concertina-type steel hoops could be quite awkward, even if they were better than the old bone ones. Then, with an effort of will, she ignored them and let them fall as they would.
Hester waited for the inevitable “How are you feeling?” Even Robert looked prepared for the traditional answer.
“I imagine now you are over the fever and most of the pain, you are thoroughly bored,” Victoria said with a little shake of her head.
Robert was startled, then his face broke into a wide smile.
“I didn’t expect you to say that,” he admitted. “Yes, I am. And terribly tired of assuring everyone that I feel all right—far, far better than I did a week ago. I read, of course, but sometimes I can hear the silence prickling in my ears, and I find my attention wandering. I want a sound of some sort, and something that responds to me. I am weary of being done to, and not doing.” He blushed suddenly, realizing how forthright he had been to a young woman who was almost a complete stranger. “I’m sorry! You didn’t come here out of kindness just to hear me complain. Everyone has been very good, really.”
“Of course they have,” she agreed, smiling back, tentatively at first. “But this is something they cannot alter. What have you been reading?”
“Dickens’s Hard Times,” he replied with a grimace. “I admit, it doesn’t cheer me much. I care about its people,” he added quickly, “but I’m not happy for them. I go to sleep and dream I live in Coketown.”
“May I bring you something different?” she offered. “Perhaps something happy? Are you”—she drew a deep breath—“are you familiar with Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense?”
His eyebrows rose. “No. But I think I might like it. It sounds like an excellent refuge from the world of Coketown.”
“It is,” she promised. “You’ll find in it the Dong with the Luminous Nose, and Jumblies, who went to sea in a sieve, and all sorts of other oddities, like Mr. Daddy Longlegs and Mr. Floppy Fly, who played at battlecock and shuttledore in the sand.”
“Please do bring it.”
“And there are drawings, of course,” she added.
Hester was satisfied. She turned and tiptoed away and went down the stairs to where Dagmar was waiting in the hall.
Victoria Stanhope visited again, on two more occasions, staying longer each time.
“I think she does him good,” Dagmar said when the maid had shown Victoria upstairs on the fourth time she called. “He seems very pleased to see her, and she is a most agreeable child. She would be quite pretty, if she were—” She stopped. “Oh, dear. That is very uncharitable of me, isn’t it?” They were standing in the conservatory in the early autumn sun. It was a charming room, full of white-painted wrought iron furniture and shaded by a mixture of potted palms and large-leafed tropical plants. The air was filled with the sweetness of several late, heavily scented lilies. “That was a terrible business about her family,” she added sadly. “I expect it has ruined her chances, poor thing.”
Naturally, she was referring to Victoria’s chances of marriage. There was no other desirable life open to a young woman of breeding, unless she had a great deal of money, or some remarkable talent, or excellent health and a burning desire for good works. Hester did not tell her that Victoria’s chances for any of these things had been ruined long before her family’s disgrace. That was Victoria’s secret to keep or to tell as she wished. Were Hester in her place, she felt she would never tell anyone at all. It was about as private a tragedy as could be imagined.
“Yes,” she said bluntly. “I expect it has.”
“How very unfair.” Dagmar shook her head slightly. “You never know what is going to happen, do you? Six weeks ago I could not have imagined Robert’s illness. Now I don’t know how much it will change our lives.” She was not looking at Hester, perhaps deliberately. After only a moment’s hesitation, as though she did not want to allow time for an answer, she hurried on. “Poor Princess Gisela must feel the same. This time last year she had all she cared about. I think every woman in the world envied her, at least a little.” She smiled. “I know I did. Don’t we all dream of having a handsome and charming man love us so passionately he would give up a kingdom and a throne simply to be with us?”
Hester thought back to being eighteen, and the dreams she had had then.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said reluctantly, oddly defensive of the girl she had been. She had felt so wise and invulnerable, and she had been so naive.
“Most of us settle for reality,” Dagmar went on. “And find it really quite good in the end. Or we make it good. But it is still natural to dream sometimes. Gisela made her dreams come true … until this spring, that is. Then Friedrich died, which left her desolated. To have had such a … a unity!” She turned to Hester. “You know they were never apart? He loved her so much he never grew tired of watching her, listening to her, hearing her laugh. He still found her just as fascinating, after twelve years.”
