Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “You have not done me the favour to answer me, Mr. Dundas,” she said.

  Evelyn was already moving the easel into position, and he just raised his eyebrows as if some preposterous riddle had been asked him.

  “No, I have no answer,” he said. “It all seems to me very just. You came here to prevent a repetition of — of what occurred when I was last alone with Miss Ellington. Was not that it?”

  Then suddenly Madge laughed; her head a little back, her eyes half-closed, and Evelyn, looking at her, gave a great triumphant explosion of sound.

  “That is it — that is what I have been trying for!” he cried. “I never quite got it. But now I can.”

  He had been painting before they came in, and he picked up the palette and dashed to the canvas.

  “Hold that if you can for half a minute!” he cried. “I don’t ask for more. Look at me; your eyes have to be on me. Ah, it is a miracle!”

  He looked once and painted; he looked and painted again. Then for the third time he looked, and looked long, but he painted no more.

  “I have done it,” he said.

  There was a long pause; he put his palette down again, and looked at Madge, as she stood there.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That will do.”

  Then Lady Ellington spoke.

  “It was hardly worth my daughter’s while to come here for half a minute,” she remarked, “or mine either.”

  Evelyn turned to her; he was conscious of even a sort of pity for her.

  “It was not worth your while,” he said, “because your presence here makes no difference. When I said your daughter might have trusted me and come here alone, I did not know what I know now. I love her. Madge, do you hear?”

  She gave one long sigh, and the scarlet cloak fell to the ground. But she did not move.

  “Oh! Evelyn,” she said.

  Lady Ellington rustled in her chair, as she might have rustled at a situation in a play that interested her. She knew what had happened, but she had not yet fully realised it. But her cool, quick brain very soon grasped it all, and began forging ahead again. There were a hundred obstacles she could yet throw in the way of this calm, advancing force.

  “And which of you proposes to tell Philip?” she said.

  The effect of this was admirable from her point of view. It brought both of the others back to earth again. Evelyn winced as if he had been struck, and Madge came quickly off the platform.

  “Philip?” she cried. “Ah, what have we done? What have we said? Philip must never know. We must never tell him. Ah, but next week!”

  The one thought that for this last ten minutes had possessed her, had possessed her to the exclusion of everything else. There had been no Philip, no world, no anything except the one inevitable fact. But Lady Ellington’s well-timed and perfectly justifiable observation made everything else, all the sorrows and the bitternesses that must come, reel into sight again. But she turned not to her mother, but to Evelyn.

  “Oh, poor Philip!” she cried. “He has always been so good, so content. And Mrs. Home —— Evelyn, what is to be done?”

  She laid her hand in appeal on his shoulder; he took it and kissed it.

  “Leave it all to me,” he said. “I will see that he knows.”

  “And you will tell him I am sorry?” she said. “You will make him understand how sorry I am, but that I could not help it?”

  “Ah, my darling!” he cried, and kissed her.

  Now, Lady Ellington had seldom in all her busy and fully-occupied life felt helpless, but she felt helpless now, and two young folk, without a plan in their heads while she was bursting with excellent plans, had brought this paralysis on her. She also had very seldom felt angry, but now it would not be too much to say that she felt furious, and her sense of impotence added to her fury. She got out of her chair and took Madge by the shoulder.

  “You ought to be whipped, Madge!” she cried.

  The girl held out her hand to her.

  “Ah, poor mother!” she said. “I had forgotten about you, because I was so happy myself. I am sorry for you, too. It is awful! But what am I to do?”

  “You are to come home with me now,” she said.

  But Madge no longer looked to her for her orders. It was for this cause, after all, that a woman also should leave her father and mother, and her allegiance was already elsewhere.

  “No; you had better wait a little,” said Evelyn, as her glance appealed to him. “There are things we must talk about at once, things that you and I must settle.”

  Madge took this; this came from the authentic source.

  “I am not coming home yet,” she said to her mother.

  Then Lady Ellington used unnecessary violence; the door banged behind her. But again her quick, cool brain was right in deciding not to stop, to wrangle, to expostulate, though a woman more stupid than she might have done so. Had she been less wise, she would have made a scene, have talked about the Fifth Commandment, have practically forced Madge, as she could no doubt have done, to come with her. But she was clever enough to see that there was no use in that. The fat was in the fire, so why pretend it was not? She could no doubt delay the actual frizzling for an hour or a day, but where was the use? If anything could still be done, the scene of the operations was not here. But she did not believe that it was all up yet, though here a stupider woman might, perhaps, have arrived at more correct conclusions. She still clung to her plotting, her planning, as if plans ever made even steerage-way against passion. And even for this forlorn hope she had to think, and think hard, whereas, those she had left behind her in the studio did not have to think at all. But her destination, anyhow, was clear enough; she had to go to see Philip. What exactly she should say to him was another question; that had to be thought out while the motor pursued its noiseless, shifting way through the traffic, steering, as a fish steers upstream, avoiding obstacles by a mere turn of the fin, imperceptible to the eye as was the movement of the steerage-wheel.

  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 ex
istence, 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.