Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It was characteristic of Reggie that he wrote an effusive though short note to Gertrude next day, saying that he had met Lady Hayes at the French Embassy, that she was perfectly beautiful and awfully nice, and that he couldn’t write any more because he was just going out to lunch with her, and that three days after this another short note followed this one, saying that Lady Hayes was awfully anxious to meet her — Gertrude — that Gertrude must come home as quick as ever she could, and that Mrs. Arbuthnot was going to Lucerne in July, so that, if Mrs. Carston could join her there, Gertrude could come straight home. He had heard that Lucerne was very slow.

  Lady Hayes had been “awfully nice” to Reggie. She had hardly ever seen anything so fresh as he was. About two days after their first meeting, Reggie had told her, with unblushing candour, all about Gertrude, and Lady Hayes was charmed to hear it. Reggie’s confession of his young love seemed simply delightful. He was so refreshingly unversed in the ways of the world. He had spoken of Gertrude with immense ardour, and had shown Lady Hayes her photograph. He had been there to call one afternoon, and had found her alone. They had tea in the little tent over the porch, which Eva kept there “en permanence,” and in which she had routed her mother-in-law a year ago.

  She was sitting in a low, basket chair, looking at the photograph, which Reggie had just put into her hand, and had turned from it to his eager, down-looking face, which appeared very attractive.

  “Charming,” she said, “simply charming! You will let me have this, won’t you? and one of yourself, too, and they shall go on the chimney-piece in my room. Really, you have no business to be as happy as this; it isn’t at all fair.”

  Reggie stood up, and drew in a long breath.

  “Yes; I’m awfully happy. I never knew anyone as happy as I am. But may I send you another photograph of her? I can get one from the photographer. You see, she gave me this herself.”

  “No; certainly not,” said Eva. “I want this one. I want it now. Surely you have no need of photographs. You have got the original, you see. And this is signed by her.”

  “Oh! but I’m sure she’d sign another one for you, if I ask her to.”

  “If it please my lord the king,” said Eva. “No; I want this one. Mayn’t I have it?”

  “Yes, it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” said Reggie, guilelessly. “I’ve got the original, as you say.”

  “Thanks so much. That is very good of you.”

  “Of course it’s an exchange,” said Reggie.

  “Ah, you’re mercenary after all. I knew I should find a weak point in you. Very good, it’s an exchange. But I don’t suppose Miss Carston would care for my photograph. She doesn’t know me, you see.”

  “Well, anyhow, mine must be an exchange.”

  “You’re very bold,” said Eva. “Of course you could make me give it you; you’re much stronger than I am. If you held me down in this chair, and throttled me until I promised, I should have to promise. I’m very cowardly. I should never have made an early Christian martyr. I should have sworn to believe in every heathen goddess, and the Thirty-Nine Articles long before they put the thumbscrew really on.”

  “Yes, I expect the thumbscrew hurt,” said Reggie, meditatively.

  “Don’t you miss her tremendously?” said Eva, looking at the photograph again. “I should think you were miserable without her.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could be miserable if I tried,” said Reggie.

  “Most people find it so easy to be miserable. But I don’t think you’re like most people.”

  “I certainly don’t find it easy to be miserable; not natural, at least. You see, Gerty’s only away for a month, and it wouldn’t do the slightest good if I was miserable.”

  “You have great common sense. Really, common sense is one of the rarest things in the world. Ah, Hayes, that is you, is it? Do you know Mr. Reggie Davenport?”

  Lord Hayes made a neat little bow, and took some tea.

  “There is a footman waiting to know if you were in,” he said. “Somebody has called.”

  “Please tell the man that I’m not in, or that I’m engaged.”

  Reggie started up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me to go?” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve been here an awful time.”

  “Sit down again,” said Eva. “You are my engagement. I don’t want you to go at all.”

  Reggie sat down again.

  “Thank you so much,” he said.

  “There has been,” said Lord Hayes, stirring his tea, “there has been a most destructive earthquake in Zante. The town, apparently, has been completely demolished.”

  Reggie tried to look interested, and said “Indeed.”

  “Do you know where Zante is?” asked Eva. “I don’t.”

  “I think it’s in the Levant,” said Reggie.

  “That makes it worse.”

  “Zante is off the west coast of Greece,” said Lord Hayes. “I was thinking at one time of building a villa there.”

  “Ah,” said Eva, “that would be charming. Have you finished your tea, Hayes? Perhaps you would order the carriage for to-night. I have to go out at half-past ten. You must find it draughty here with your bad cold. You would be prudent to sit indoors.”

  Reggie looked at him with sympathy as he went inside.

  “I’m sorry he’s got a cold,” he said.

  “It is an intermittent catarrh,” said Eva, with amusement. “There is nothing to be anxious about — thanks.”

  Lord Hayes had gone indoors without protest or remonstrance, but he was far from not feeling both. The polite indifference which Eva had practised earlier in their married life — the neutral attitude — had begun to wear very thin. When they were alone, he did not care much whether she was polite or not, but he distinctly objected to be made a fool of in public. Why he had not made a stand on this occasion, and insisted that he had no cold at all, which was indeed the case, he found himself wondering, even as he was making his retreat, but that wonder brought him no nearer to doing it. Investigation into mesmerism and other occult phenomena are bringing us nearer a rational perception of such forces, and we are beginning to believe that each man has a set of moral muscles, which exercise moral force, just as he has a similar physical system which is superior or inferior to that of another man. And to judge by any analogy which is known to us, it appears inevitable that when one moral organisation strips as it were to another moral organisation, that a fight, a victory and a defeat will be the result. Eva’s prize fight with her husband had lasted more than a year, and though it was practically over, yet the defeated party still delivered itself of small protests from time to time, which resembled those anonymous challenges, or challenges in which it is not distinctly stated that “business is meant,” and which are common in the columns of such periodicals as register the more palpable sort of encounters.

  Lord Hayes, in fact, still preserved his malignant potentialities. It was a source of satisfaction to him that he still retained a slight power of annoying Eva in small ways. This he did not venture to use in public, because, if Eva suspected anything like a whisper of a challenge not strictly in private, she would take steps to investigate it, and these public investigations were not to his taste. But in private he could vent a little malignity without being publicly pommelled for it.

  Thus it came about that, when they were seated at dinner alone that night, Lord Hayes said, —

  “May I ask who that young man was with you? He was here yesterday, I believe.”

  “Didn’t I introduce you?” said Eva. “I thought I did. It was Reggie Davenport.”

  “What do you intend to do with him?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is he to be a sort of Jim Armine the second?”

  Eva finished eating her soufflé without replying, and Lord Hayes rather prematurely thought the shot had told.

  “Oh! dear no,” she said at length, “nothing of the sort. I am very fond of Reggie Davenport. Quite devoted to hi
m, in fact. He is quite the nicest young man I ever saw.”

  “I thought you were very fond of Jim.”

  “How dull men are,” said Eva. “Any woman would have seen at once that it was he who was fond of me. But with Reggie — he asked me to call him Reggie — it is reciprocal, I think. I should advise you to be jealous.”

  “I should not think of such a thing,” said he. “Nothing makes a man so ridiculous as to be jealous.”

  “Except, perhaps, to be complaisant,” said Eva, not sparing herself in the desire not to spare him. “I think that is absurder still.”

  “I have no intention of being complaisant.”

  “That is such a comfort,” said Eva; “it is a great thing to know that one’s honour is safe in one’s husband’s hands. You are my guardian angel. Are you coming to the ball to-night? Yes? I shall be upstairs in my room. Please send a man to tell me when the carriage is round. And don’t keep me waiting as you did on Thursday.”

  Eva went upstairs into her room, and found, among her letters, Reggie’s photograph, which he had already sent. She took it up and looked at it for a few moments, and placed it by the side of Gertrude’s. Something, perhaps the scene at dinner, had made her restless, and she walked up and down the room, with her long, white dress sweeping the ground behind her.

  “What is the matter with me?” she thought to herself impatiently. “Surely I, of all people—”

  She sat down again and opened some of her letters. There was one from her mother, who was coming to stay with them for a week or two.

  “I hear such a lot about you,” she wrote; “everyone seems to be talking about nothing else except Lady Hayes and her beauty and success. And when I think that it is my own darling little Eva, I can only feel full of gratitude and thankfulness that a mother’s prayers for her own daughter’s welfare have been answered so fully and bountifully. But I hope that, in the riches of love and position and success, which have been so fully granted her, she will not forget—”

  Eva tore the letter in half with a sudden, dramatic gesture, and threw it into the paper-basket. She was annoyed, ashamed of herself for her want of self-control, but a new spring of feeling had been rising in her this last day or two, that gave her a sense of loss, of something missed which might never come again, a feeling which she had experienced in some degree after her marriage, when she found out what it was to be linked to a man who did not love her, and whom she was beginning to detest. But now the feeling was deeper, keener, more painful, and from the mantlepiece Reggie’s photograph looked at her, smiling, well-bred, well-dressed, and astonishingly young. Surely it couldn’t be that!

  An hour later a message came that the carriage was round, and she went downstairs again, impassive, cold, perfectly beautiful. As she swept down into the hall, Lord Hayes, who was standing there, with a pair of white kid gloves in his hand, was suddenly struck and astonished at her beauty. He felt freshly proud at having become the owner of this dazzling, perfect piece of life. He moved forward to meet her, and in a burst of pleased proprietorship, laying his hand on her bare arm, —

  “My dear Eva,” he said, “you are more beautiful than ever.”

  Eva looked at him for a moment fixedly; then she suddenly shook his hand off.

  “Ah! don’t touch me,” she said shuddering, and moved past him and got into the carriage.

  Lord Hayes, however, had one consolation which Eva could never deprive him of, and that was the knowledge that she was his, and the knowledge that she knew it. She might writhe and shrink, or treat him with indifference, or scorn, or anger, but she could never alter that, except by disgracing herself, and she was too proud and sensitive, as he knew, to do anything of the sort. Consequently, her assaults on him at dinner on the subject of complaisance did not trouble him for a moment. It was morally impossible, he felt, for her to put him into such a position, for her own position was as dear to her as he was odious. His lordship had a certain cynical sense of humour, which whispered that though this state of things was not pleasant, it was distinctly amusing.

  Meantime, as the days went on, if Eva was beginning to be a little anxious about herself, Mrs. Davenport was not at her ease about Reggie. Gertrude’s letters came regularly, and he liked to let his mother read them, and they, at any rate, betrayed no dissatisfaction. But in one of these which arrived soon after the last interview recorded between Lady Hayes and Reggie, Mrs. Davenport suddenly felt frightened. It was a very short sentence which gave rise to this feeling, and apparently a very innocent one: —

  “What on earth does Lady Hayes want my photograph for?”

  Reggie was sitting by the open window after a particularly late breakfast, smoking into the window box. His back was turned to the room, and he was apparently absorbed in his occupation. He had read Gertrude’s letter as he was having breakfast, and when he had finished, he had given it to his mother, saying —

  “Such a jolly note from Gerty; you will like to see it, mummy.”

  Mrs. Davenport read it and looked up with some impatience at the lounging figure in the window seat.

  “What’s this about Gerty’s photograph and Lady Hayes?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  Reggie did not appear to hear, and continued persecuting a small, green fly that was airing itself on a red geranium, and was consequently conspicuous.

  “You may smoke in here, Reggie,” said Mrs. Davenport, raising her voice a little; “come in and sit down.”

  Reggie turned round somewhat unwillingly. He had heard his mother’s first question, and it had suddenly struck him that it was rather an awkward one. A very frank nature will, on occasions, use extreme frankness to cover the deficiency of it, and he decided that the whole truth, very openly stated, was less liable to involve him in difficulties than the subtlest prevarication.

  “Oh, Lady Hayes said she wanted Gerty’s photograph and mine,” he said, walking towards his mother. “Of course, I gave them her, and she gave me hers in exchange. I told Gerty all about it in a letter.”

  Mrs. Davenport looked up at him, and observed that his face was flushed.

  “What an odd request,” she said.

  “I don’t see why. I know her quite well, somehow, though I have only known her such a short time.”

  There was a short silence. Mrs. Davenport was casting about in her mind as to how she might learn what she wanted, without betraying her desire to know it.

  “Did you write to Gerty yesterday?” she asked at length.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Reggie, frankly. “I was out all day and then I went to the Hayes in the evening.”

  “Are you going out to Lucerne at the end of the month?”

  “No, I think not; somebody told me — Lady Hayes, I think — that it was awfully slow. I told Gerty the Arbuthnots were going out, and suggested she should leave Mrs. Carston with them and come back to London. I like London, somehow, this year.”

  Mrs. Davenport was beginning to understand. She could have found it in her heart at that moment to label Eva with some names that would have astonished her.

  “Does Lady Hayes talk about Gerty much?”

  “Oh, yes, a good deal; at least, she lets me talk about her whenever I want to.”

  “Is that a good deal?”

  Reggie frowned. He had been acting for this last week or so with such spontaneity, obeying so instantaneously his inclinations, that he found it hard to answer questions about these things. It is always harder to recall what we have done unthinkingly, than what has been the result of thought or conscious effort.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We talk about her now and then, but we talk about a thousand things. I don’t know what you mean. Lady Hayes said the other day that she was sure Gerty would detest her.”

  “I think Lady Hayes is probably quite right.”

  “Then it would be very unreasonable of Gerty,” said Reggie, frowning again, “and I don’t know why you think so. Why should Gerty detest her?”

  “
Does she strike you as the sort of woman Gerty would like?”

  “I don’t think I ever thought about it till Lady Hayes mentioned it, and I disagreed with her.”

  “You told me the other day that you and Gerty agreed that you only liked good people. I don’t think Gerty would think her good.”

  Reggie flushed angrily.

  “I don’t really see what you are driving at,” he said rather vehemently, because he did see. “I think I won’t talk about her any more if you don’t mind, mummy. You see she’s very kind and delightful to me, and that’s all that I have any right to judge by, and I’m sure she’d be just as nice to Gerty.”

  He sauntered out of the room with rather exaggerated slowness, feeling a little uneasy. He was just conscious that this new element which had come into his life was a very absorbing one, and he wondered a little how absorbing it was in proportion to other things. Eva showed to him a different side to that she showed to the world; she was careful when he was there not to say quite what she was in the habit of saying, when she was with others. She regarded him as a child — a very charming, delightful child — and she knew that the greatest respect, as one of the most finished artists of human life has said, was due to children. In fact, according to his data, Reggie’s glowing, adoring picture of her was faithful enough. Why Eva behaved like that to him is a question which concerned her alone, and of which the answer was even now working out in her mind. She had tried the world for two years, and had found it distinctly wanting. It amused her at times, but it bored her more frequently. The frantic interest which she had taken in men and women was beginning to pall a little; even the interest she had taken in herself was not so deep as it had been. It must be remembered that the world, as she knew it, was a certain section of society which, however much its units differ in individuality, is, to a certain extent, all dulled and choked in the limitations of its class, the inexorable need to be well dressed, to be successful, to be smart. Diversity of interest is the only thing that will make interest long lived; and diversity was exactly what was wanting. The gossip, the whispered scandals, the scheming, the jostling, were new to her at first, and she had drunk them down eagerly, but in her heart of hearts she knew that she was just a little tired of it all, and she was beginning to behave as others behaved, not because it was the most amusing thing that could be done, but because others behaved so. On this stale, gas-lit atmosphere Reggie had come like a whiff of fresh air. He had not the smallest interest in scandal or gossip, or any of those things in which her world found its entire interest settled. He was new, he was fresh, and he was young.