Эдвард Бенсон
The Angel of Pain
But as she went, she thought heavily. Her whole plans up till now had broken down completely. A very short survey of the last hour or two was sufficient to convince her of that, and, once convinced, it was contrary to her whole nature to waste a further ounce of thought on them. The flaws there had been in them she momentarily deplored; they might obviously have been better, else they would not have failed, but to deposit even a regret over them was mere misuse of time. They were discarded, as an old fashion is discarded, and the dressmaker who attempts to revive it is a fool. Lady Ellington certainly was not that, and as the motor hummed eastwards towards the City she cast no thought backwards, since this was throwing good brain-power after bad, but forwards. In half an hour she would be with Philip; what was to be her line? But, puzzle as she might, she could find no line that led anywhere, for at the end of each, ready to meet her on the platform, so to speak, stood Evelyn and Madge together.
Lady Ellington was going through quite a series of new sensations this afternoon, and here was one she had scarcely ever felt before – for in addition to her impotence and her anger, she was feeling flurried and frightened. She could not yet quite believe that this crash was inevitable, but it certainly threatened, and threatened in a toppling, imminent manner. And thus all her thinking powers were reduced to mere miserable apprehension.
She had guessed rightly that Philip would still be in the City, and drove straight to his office. He was engaged at the moment, but sent out word that he would see her as soon as he possibly could. Meantime, she was shown into a room for the reception of clients, and left alone there. In the agitation which was gaining on her she had a morbid sensitiveness to tiny impressions, and the trivial details of the room forced themselves in on her. It was a gloomy sort of little well set in the middle of the big room, with its rows of clerks on high stools with busy pens. The morning’s paper lay on the table. There was an empty inkstand there also, and a carafe of water with a glass by it. A weighing machine, with no particular reason to justify its existence, stood in one corner; against the wall was an empty book-case. The Turkey carpet was old and faded, and four or five mahogany chairs stood against the wall. Then, after ten minutes of solitary confinement here, the door opened and Philip came in, looking rather grave as was his wont, but strong and self-reliant – the sort of man whom anyone would be glad to have on his side in any emergency or difficulty. One glance at her was sufficient to tell him that something had happened, no little thing, but something serious; and though he had intended to propose that they should go to his room, he shut the door quickly behind him.
“What is it?” he said. “What has happened? Is it – is it anything about Madge?”
“Oh! Philip, it is too dreadful,” she began.
Philip drummed on the table with his fingers.
“Just tell me straight, please,” he said, quite quietly. “Is she dead?”
Lady Ellington got up and leaned her elbow on the chimney-piece, turning away from him.
“I have just come from Mr. Dundas’s studio,” she said. “Ah, don’t interrupt me,” she added, as Philip made a sudden involuntary exclamation – “let me get through with it. I left Madge with him. They have declared their love for each other.”
For a moment or two he did not seem to understand what she said, for he frowned as if puzzled, as if she had spoken to him in some tongue he did not know.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked.
Lady Ellington’s own most acute feelings of rage, indignation, disappointment, were for the moment altogether subordinated by her pity for this strong man, who had suddenly been dealt this shattering, paralysing blow. If he had raged and stormed, if he had cursed Madge and threatened to shoot Evelyn, she would have felt less sorry for him. But the quietness with which he received it was more pathetic, all strength had gone from him.
“What do you recommend me to do?” he asked, after a pause.
“Ah, that is what I have been trying to puzzle out all the way here,” she said. “Surely you can do something? There must be something to be done. You’re not going to sit down under this? Don’t tell me that! Go to the studio, anyhow – my motor is outside – storm, rage, threaten. Take her away. Tell him to her face what sort of a thing he has done!”
Philip still exhibited the same terrible quietness, unnatural, so Lady Ellington felt it, though she was not mistaken enough to put it down to want of feeling. The feeling, on the other hand, she knew was like some close-fitting, metal frame; it was the very strength and stricture of it that prevented his moving. Then he spoke again.
“And what has he done?” he asked. “He has fallen in love with her. I’m sure I don’t wonder. And what has she done? She has fallen in love with him. And I don’t wonder at that either.”
Now the minutes were passing, and if there was the slightest chance of saving the situation, it had to be taken now. In a few hours even it might easily be too late.
“Just go there,” she said. “I know well how this thing has shattered you, so that you can hardly feel it yet; but perhaps the sight of them together may rouse you. Perhaps the sight of you may stir in Madge some sense of her monstrous behaviour. I would sooner she had died on her very wedding-day than that she should have done this. It is indecent. It is, perhaps, too, only a passing fancy, she – ”
But here she stopped, for she could not say to him the rest of her thought, which was the expression of the hope that Madge might return to her quiet, genuine liking for Philip. But she need scarcely have been afraid, for in his mind now, almost with the vividness of a hallucination, was that scene on the terrace of the house at Pangbourne, when she had promised him esteem, affection and respect, all, in fact, that she knew were hers to give. But now she had more to give, only she did not give it to him.
“I am bound to do anything you think can be of use,” he said, “and, therefore, if you think it can be of use that I should go there, I will go. I do not myself see of what use it can be.”
“It may,” said Lady Ellington. “There is a chance, what, I can’t tell you. But there is certainly no chance any other way.”
Then his brain and his heart began to stir and move again a little, the constriction of the paralysis was passing off.
“But if she only takes me out of pity,” he said, “I will not take her on those terms. She shall not be my wife if she knows what love is and knows it for another.”
Then the true Lady Ellington, the one who had been a little obscured for the last ten minutes by her pity for Philip, came to the light again.
“Ah, take her on any terms,” she cried. “It will be all right. She will love you. I am a woman, and I know what women are. No woman has ever yet made the absolute ideal marriage unless she was a fool. Women marry more or less happily; if Madge marries you, she will marry extremely happily. Take my word for that. Now go.”
Through the City the tides of traffic were at their height; all down the Strand also there was no break or calm in the surge of vehicles, and the progress of the motor was slow and constantly interrupted. Sometimes for some fifty or a hundred yards there would be clear running, and his thoughts on the possibilities which might exist would shoot ahead also. Then came a slow down, a check, a stop, and he would tell himself that he might spare his pains in going at all. True, before now it had more than once occurred to him as conceivable that Evelyn was falling in love with Madge, but on every occasion when this happened he had whistled the thought home again, telling himself that he had no business to send it out on this sort of errand. That, however, was absolutely all the preparation he had had for this news, and he had to let it soak in, for at first it stood like a puddle after a heavy storm on the surface of his mind. This was an affair of many minutes, but as it went on he began to realise himself the utter hopelessness of this visit which Lady Ellington had recommended. They might both of them, it was possible, when they saw him, recoil from the bitter wrong they were doing, the one to his friend, the other to her accepted lover; but how could that recoil remain permanent, how could their natural human shrinking from this cruelty possibly breed the rejection of each by the other? However much he himself might suffer, though their pity for him was almost infinite, though they might even, to go to the furthest possible point, settle to part, – yet that voluntary separation, if both agreed to it, would but make each the more noble, the more admirable, to the other. Or Madge again alone, in spite of Evelyn, might say she could not go back on her already plighted troth, and express her willingness to marry him. She might go even further, she might say, and indeed feel, that it was only by keeping her word to him that she could free her own self, her own moral nature, from the sin and stain in which she had steeped it. Loyalty, affection, esteem would certainly all draw her to this, but it was impossible that in her eyes, as they looked their last on Evelyn, there should not be regret and longing and desire. Whether he ever saw it there himself or not, Philip must know it had been there, and that at the least the memory of it must always be there.
How little had he foreseen this or anything remotely resembling it on that moonlight night. She promised to give him then all that she was, all that she knew of in herself, and it was with a thrill of love, exquisite and secret, that he had promised himself to teach her what she did not know. It should be he who would wake in her passion and the fire and the flower of her womanhood, and even as he had already given himself and all he was to her, so she, as the fire awoke, should find that precious gift of herself to him daily grow in worth and wonder. It was that, that last and final gift that she had promised now, but not to him. And with that given elsewhere, he felt he would not, or rather could not, take her, even if it was to deliver her soul from hell itself.
Then (and in justice to him it must be said that this lasted only for a little time), what other people would say weighed on him, and what they would say with regard to his conduct now. And for the same minute’s pace he almost envied those myriad many to whom nothing happens, who know nothing of the extremes of joy, such as he had felt, or the extremes of utter abandonment and despair, such as were his now. Assuredly, in the world’s view, it was now in his power to do something to right himself, to make himself appear, anyhow, what is called a man of spirit; he could curse her, he could strike him; he could make some explosion or threaten it, which would be hard for either of the two others to face. Madge had sat to Evelyn alone, she had often done that, Evelyn was a friend of his; and here he could blast him, he could make him appear such that the world in general would surely decline the pleasure of his acquaintance. Madge again, if he was minded on vengeance, how execrable, how rightly execrable, he could make her conduct appear. There was no end to the damage, reckoning damage by the opinion of the world, that he could do to both of them. All this he could easily do; the bakemeats for the marriage-table were, so to speak, already hot – they could so naturally furnish the funeral-feast, as far as the world was concerned, of either Evelyn or Madge. The whole thing was indecent.
Step by step, punctuated to the innumerable halts of the motor-car, the idea gained on him. Between them there had been made an attempt to wreck him; wreck he was, yet his wreck might be the derelict in the ocean on which their own pleasure-bark would founder. At that moment the desire for vengeance struck him with hot, fiery buffet, but, as it were, concealed its face the while, so that he should not recognise it was the lust for vengeance that had thus scorched him, and, indeed, it appeared to him that he only demanded justice, the barest, simplest justice, such as a criminal never demands in vain. It was no more than right that Evelyn should reap the natural, inevitable harvest of what he had done, and since Madge had joined herself to him, it must be to her home also that he should bring back the bitter sheaves. Indeed, should Philip himself have mercy, should he at any rate keep his hand from any deed and his tongue from any word that could hurt them, yet that would not prevent the consequences reaching them, for the world assuredly would not treat them tenderly, and would only label him spiritless for so doing. For the world, to tell the truth, is not, in spite of its twenty centuries of Christianity, altogether kind yet, and when buffeted on one cheek does not as a rule turn the other. More especially is this so when one of its social safeguards is threatened; it does not immediately surrender and invite the enemy to enter the next fort. And the jilt – which Madge assuredly was, though perhaps to jilt him was akin to a finer morality than to go through with her arranged marriage – is an enemy of Society. Male or female, the jilt, like the person who cheats at cards, will not do; to such people it is impossible to be kind, for they have transgressed one of Society’s precious little maxims, that you really must not do these things, because they lead to so much worry and discomfort. Wedding-presents have to be sent back, arrangements innumerable have to be countermanded, subjects have to be avoided in the presence of the injured parties.
It was the unworthier Philip, as he drove to Chelsea, who let these thoughts find harbourage in his mind. But somewhere deep down in his inner consciousness, he knew that there was something finer to be done, something that the world would deride and laugh at, if he did it. How much better he knew to disregard that, and to be big; to go there, to say that his own engagement to Madge was based on a mistake, a misconception, to accept what had happened, to tell them, as some inner and nobler fibre of his soul told him, that his own personal sorrow weighed nothing as compared with the more essential justice of two who loved each other being absolutely free, however much external circumstances retarded, to marry. He was capable even in this early smart of conceiving that; was he capable of acting up to it?
He was but twenty doors from the studio in King’s Road when the finer way became definite in his mind, and he called to the chauffeur to stop, for he literally did not know if he could do this. But he realised that otherwise his visit would be better left unpaid; there was no good in his going there, if he was to do anything else than this. Then he got out of the car.
“You can go home,” he said to the chauffeur.
The man touched his cap in acknowledgment of the tip that Philip gave him, waited for a lull in the traffic, and turned. Philip was left alone on the pavement, looking after the yellow-panelled carriage.
Then he turned round quickly; his mind was already made up; he would go there, he would act as all that was truly best in him dictated. But as he hesitated, looking back, two figures had come close to him from a door near, hailing a hansom. When he turned they were close to him.
His eyes blazed suddenly with a hard, angry light; his mouth trembled, the sight of them together roused in him the full sense of the injury he had suffered.
“Ah, there you are!” he cried. “I curse you both; I pray that the misery you have brought on me may return double-fold to you!”
Evelyn had drawn back a step, putting his arm out to shelter Madge, for it seemed as if Philip would strike her. But the next moment he turned on his heel again, and walked away from them.
TWELFTH
MRS. HOME was walking gently up and down the terrace in front of the drawing-room windows at her son’s house above Pangbourne. The deep heat of the July afternoon lay heavily on river and land and sky, for the last fortnight, even in the country, had been of scorching sort, and the great thunderstorm which, ten days ago, had been as violent here as in the New Forest, had not sensibly relieved the air. Philip had not been down for nearly a month, and his mother, though she knew nothing about gardening (her ideal of a garden-bed was a row of lobelias, backed by a row of calceolarias, backed by a row of scarlet geraniums), felt vaguely that though she did not at all understand the sort of thing Philip wanted, he would be disappointed about the present result. For to-day she had received a telegram from him – he telegraphed the most iniquitously lengthy and unnecessary communication – saying that he would arrive that evening. Surely a postcard even the day before would have conveyed as much as this telegram, which told her that he was coming down alone, that he wished a reply if anyone was staying with her, and, if so, who, that he was leaving Madge in London, and that Evelyn, who had proposed himself for this last Saturday till Monday in July, was not coming. Also – this was all in the telegram for which a postcard the day before could have done duty – Gladys Ellington and her husband, who were to have spent the three days with them, were unable to come, and he supposed, therefore, that his mother and he would be alone. The little party, in fact, that had been arranged would not take place; he himself would come down there as expected, but nobody else.
To Mrs. Home this was all glad news of a secret kind. She had seen so little of Philip lately, and to her mother’s heart it was a warming thing to know that he was to spend the last Sunday of his bachelor life with her, and with nobody else. To say that she had been hurt at his wishing the family into which he was to marry being present on these last days before he definitely left his mother to cleave to his wife would be grossly misinterpreting her feeling; only she was herself glad that she would have him alone just once more. For the two had been not only mother and son, but the most intimate of friends; none had held so close a place to him, and now that Mrs. Home felt, rightly enough, that henceforward she must inevitably stand second in his confidence, she was, selfishly she was afraid but quite indubitably, delighted to know that they were to have one more little time quite alone. All that was to be said between them had already been said, she had for herself no last words, and felt sure that Philip had not either, and she rehearsed in her mind the quiet, ordinary little occupations that should make the days pass so pleasantly, as they had always passed when they two were alone together. Philip would get down by tea-time on Saturday, and was sure to spend a couple of hours in the garden or on the river. Then would follow dinner out on the terrace if this heat continued, and after dinner she would probably play Patience, while Philip watched her as he smoked from a chair beside her observing with vigilant eye any attempt to cheat on her part. Mrs. Home’s appetite for cards was indeed somewhat minute, and if after twenty minutes or so Miss Milligan, unlike a growing girl, showed no signs of “coming out,” she would, it must be confessed, enable her to do so by means not strictly legitimate. Sometimes one such evasion on her part would pass unnoticed by Philip, which encouraged her, if the laws of chance or her own want of skill still opposed the desired consummation, to cheat again. But this second attempt was scarcely ever successful, she was almost always found out, and Philip demanded a truthful statement as to whether a similar lamentable indiscretion had occurred before. When they were alone, too, Philip always read prayers in the evening, some short piece of the Bible, followed by a few collects. This little ceremony somehow was more intimately woven in with Mrs. Home’s conception of “Philip” than anything else. It must be feared, indeed, that the dear little old lady did not pay very much attention either to the chapter he read or the prayers he said, but “Philip reading Prayers” was a very precious and a very integral part of her life. His strong, deep voice, his strong, handsome face vividly illuminated by the lamp he would put close to him, the row of silent servants, the general sense of good and comforting words, if comfort was needed, words, anyhow, that were charged with protection and love, all these things were a very real part of that biggest thing in her life, namely, that she was his mother, and he her son. Her son, bone of her bone, and born of her body, and how dear even he did not guess.
Sunday took up the tale that was so sweet to her. He would be late for breakfast, as he always was, and very likely she would have finished before he came down. But she never missed hearing his foot on the polished boards of the hall, and if he was very late she would have rung for a fresh teapot before he entered the room, since she had a horror, only equalled by her horror of snakes, of tea that had stood long. Often he was so late that his breakfast really had to be curtailed if they were to get to church before the service began, for they always walked there, and her mind was sometimes painfully divided as to whether it would not be better to be late rather than that he should have an insufficient breakfast. She had heard great things of Plasmon, and a year ago had secretly bought a small tin of that highly nutritious though perhaps slightly insipid powder, of which she meant to urge a tablespoonful on Philip if he seemed to her not to have had enough to eat before he started for church, since apparently this would be the equivalent of several mutton chops. But the tin had remained unopened, and only a few weeks ago she had thrown it away, having read some case of tinned-food poisoning in the papers. How dreadful if she meant to give him the equivalent of several mutton chops, and had succeeded only in supplying him with a fatal dose of ptomaine!
Then after the walk back through the pleasant fields there would be lunch, and after lunch in this July heat, long lounging in some sheltered spot in the garden. Tea followed, and after tea Philip’s invariable refusal to go to church again, and her own invariable yielding to his wish that she should not go either. That again was an old-established affair, uninteresting and unessential no doubt to those who drive four-in-hand through life, but to this quiet old lady, whose nature had grown so fine through long years of speckless life, a part of herself. He would urge the most absurd reasons; she would be going alone, and would probably be waylaid and robbed for the sake of her red-and-gold Church-service; it threatened rain, and she would catch the most dreadful rheumatism; or life was uncertain at the best, and this might easily be the last Sunday that he would spend here, and how when she had buried him about Wednesday would she like the thought that she had refused his ultimate request? This last appeal was generally successful, and it was left for Mrs. Home to explain to their vicar, who always dined with them on Sunday, her unusual absence. This she did very badly, and Philip never helped her out. It was a point of honour that she should not say that it was he who had induced her to stay away, and his grave face watching her from the other side of the table as she invented the most futile of excuses, seemed to her to add insult to the injury he had already done her in obliging her to invent what would not have deceived a sucking child.
Then on Monday morning he would generally have to leave for town very early, but if this was the case, he always came to her room to wish her good-bye. And her good-bye to him meant what it said. “God be with you, my dear,” was it, and she added always, “Come again as soon as you can.”
All these things, the memory of those days and hours which were so inexpressibly dear to her, moved gently and evenly in Mrs. Home’s mind, even as the shadows drew steadily and slowly across the grass as she walked up and down awaiting his arrival. And if sadness was there at all, it was only the wonderful and beautiful sadness that pervaded the evening hour itself, the hour when shadows lengthen, and the coolness of the sunset tells us that the day, the serene and sunlit day, is drawing to a close. That the day should end was inevitable; the preciousness of sunlit hours was valued because night would follow them, for had they been known to be everlasting, the joy of plucking their sweetness would have vanished. And the same shadowed thought was present in Mrs. Home’s mind as she thought how the evening of her particular relationship to Philip was come; all these memories, though dear they would always be, gathered a greater fragrance because in the nature of things they must be temporary and transitory, even as the memory of childish days is dear simply because one is a child no longer. While childhood remained they were uncoloured by romance, the romance the halo of them only begins to glow when it is known that they are soon to be at an end.
Yet Mrs. Home would not have had anything different; that her relation to Philip must fade as the day-star in the light of dawn, she had always known. Even when the day-star was very bright and the dawn not yet hinted in Eastern skies, she knew that, and now when the whole East was suffused with the rosy glow, she would not have delayed the upleap of the resplendent sun by an hour or a minute. For old-age unembittered was her’s, and in the completeness and fulness of Philip’s manhood, not in keeping him undeveloped and unstung by the sunlight, though through it was flung bitter foam of the sea that breaks forever round this life of man, she realised not herself only but him most fully and best. She would not retain him, even if she could; he had got to live his life, and make it as round and perfect as it could be made. It was her part only to watch from the shore as he put out into the breakers, and wish him God-speed. Yet now, as far as she could forecast, no breakers were there, a calm sunny ocean awaited him; there was but the tide which would bear him smoothly out. How far he would go, whether out of sight of the land, where she strained dim eyes after him, or whether, so to speak, he should anchor close to her, she did not know. He had now to put out; once more they – he and she alone – would play together on the sands, but each would know – he very much more than she, that they played together for the last time. After this he must, as he ought, take another for his playmate. And if at the thought her kind blue eyes were a little dim, it was the flesh only that was weak. With all her soul she bade him push out, and if to herself she said: “Oh, Philip! must you go?” all in herself that she wished to be reckoned by, all that was truly herself, said “God-speed” to him.
The gardeners at Pangbourne Court had been startled into dreadful activity that day. “The master,” it was known, would be down for this Sunday, but “the master” by himself was a much more formidable affair than he with a party. As Philip had conjectured at Whitsuntide, there would come a break in the happy life of the garden, and it was quite indubitably here now. The hot and early summer which had produced so glorious an array of blossom in that June week now exacted payment for that; roses which should have flowered into August had exhausted themselves, the blooms of summer were really over, while the autumn plants were still immature. All this was really not the fault of the gardeners, but of the weather; but, as has been said, they were stirred into immense activity by the prospect of Philip’s arrival, since if the beds presented a fair show, he would be more likely to be lenient to other deficiencies. But Mrs. Home, as she went up and down the paths waiting for his arrival, saw but too clearly that things were not quite as they should be. A dryness, an arrest of growth, seemed to have laid hands on the beds; it was as if some catastrophe had stricken the vegetable kingdoms that withered and blighted them. The grass of the lawn, too, lacked the vividness of the velvet that so delighted Philip’s London-wearied eye – there were patches of brown and withered green everywhere, instead of the “excellent emerald.” Yet, perhaps, surely almost, he would not vex himself with that. Three days only intervened between now and the twenty-eighth; he would have no fault to find with anything in the sunlight of life which so streamed on him.
She was passing between two old hedges of yew, compact and thick of growth as a brick wall, and impervious to the vision. Her own path lay over the grass, but on either far side of these hedges was a gravel walk, and half-way up this she heard a footstep sounding crisply. For one moment she thought it was Philip’s, and nearly called to him, the next she smiled at herself for having thought so, for it altogether lacked the brisk decision with which he walked, and she made sure it was one of the gardeners. It went parallel with her, however, in the same direction, and when she got to the end of her own yew-girt avenue, she met the owner of the footstep in the little sunk Alpine garden, which was Philip’s especial delight. It was he. She had not recognised the footstep, and though when they met, her eyes told her that this certainly was her son, it was someone so different from him whom she knew that she scarcely recognised him.
Misery sat in his face, misery and a hardness as of iron. He often looked stern, often looked tired, but now it seemed as if it was of life that he was tired, and his whole face was inflexible and inexorable. It was not the sort of misery that could break down and sob itself into acquiescence, it was the misery of the soul into which the iron has entered. And mother and son looked at each other long without speaking, he with that face and soul of iron, she with a hundred terrors winnowing her. He had not given her any greeting, nor she him. Then she clasped her hands together in speechless entreaty, and held them out to him. But still he said nothing, and it was she who spoke first.