Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The silence that succeeded this unfortunate speech was one that might, like darkness, be felt. Mr. Dennison, intoxicated by his own voice, had “forgotten.” The silence made him remember. But the silence, though pregnant, was of almost infinitesimal duration, for Lord Dover immediately resorted to the grilse caught the day before, which was now kedgeree; his wife from the other end of the table, and without consultation, recommended Mr. Osborne to try it, and Lady Angela looked forward in anticipation to the lovely views that she and Mrs. Dennison were certain to enjoy during their drive. But this instinctive buzz to bury what had gone before died down, and the dead subject seemed like to have a disconcerting and resurging silence. But Lady Dover, whose mind was already made up on this subject, indicated her attitude. She turned to Lady Ellington, who sat three places from her, and in her quiet voice the social oracle thundered prophecy and promise —

  “And how is dear Madge, Lady Salmon?” she said. “I wonder if we could induce her and Mr. Dundas to come for a week or two before we go south? It would be such a pleasure. She would enjoy these beautiful walks, I am sure, and Mr. Dundas must be so very hard-worked that I am certain a little holiday would do him good.”

  That was the pronunciamento for which Lady Ellington really had come here, weighing light all the discomfort of travel and the dulness of the days that she anticipated. It had been forced, squirted as it were, out of her hostess, but nobody had ever squirted out of Lady Dover anything insincere. She often, in fact, refrained from saying all she meant, but she never said what she did not mean. Her word was as good as the bond of anybody else’s; it was trustworthy coinage, sterling in its own dominions. And Lady Ellington accepted it as such, not ringing it or testing it in any way. That it was given her was quite enough.

  “I am sure Madge would love to come,” she said, “if she can only tear” — she could not help hesitating a moment— “tear dear Evelyn away from his work. He is so busy; everybody wants to be painted by him. And I’m sure I don’t wonder. His portrait of Madge! It is too extraordinary! You expect her to get down from the easel and say something characteristic. The hands, too, surely, Mr. Dennison, you don’t think the hands are like bunches of bananas in Mr. Dundas’s picture of my daughter?”

  Mr. Dennison had not seen the picture; he hastened also to qualify what he had said before. The qualification did not fare quite so well at his hands as the missing spoon had done. That in itself was not extraordinary, since there was no comparison between the respective difficulties of effecting these two disappearances. But breakfast was practically over, and the need for beating a further retreat was thus reduced to an irreducible minimum.

  The shooters and the stalker went their ways immediately, the motor-car was also soon round to convey Lady Angela and Mrs. Dennison to their friends, and it was not extraordinary that the artist did not join the remainder of the party on the terrace. Gladys also had gone to consult with the gillie on the question of flies, and thus in ten minutes Lady Dover and Lady Ellington were alone in their after-breakfast stroll. The latter, as usual, went straight to the point; she did not want to talk about salmon pools and rowan-berries or the prospects of slain stags; she had come here to find out what Lady Dover thought about Madge. For this purpose she called Lady Dover by her Christian name, as one has to begin some time. Her Christian name was Susan, a name inimical for confidences, but it could not be helped now.

  “Oh, Susan,” she said, “you don’t mind my calling you that, do you, because I feel such friends with you. You have no idea how relieved I am. I wanted so much to know what you thought about poor Madge, and I should have found it so hard to begin, unless you had said what you did say at breakfast about asking them here. Of course it was all a terrible grief to me, you can well understand that.”

  “Yes, dear?” said Lady Dover interrogatively.

  “I know you see what I mean. The marriage with Philip Home was so nice, so suitable, and it was all arranged. People stopped in London particularly for it.”

  Lady Dover’s calm eyes surveyed the terrace, the glen, and lastly her companion.

  “But surely that is rather a conventional view to take,” she said. “What does a little inconvenience matter, if your daughter’s happiness is secured? I am told they are devoted to each other.”

  Now Lady Ellington in her most wild and wayward dreams had never conceived it possible that she could be called, or remotely labelled, “conventional” by Susan. She had much to learn, however.

  “I hope I am not a slave to convention, or anything of the sort,” continued Lady Dover; “but if Madge really loved Mr. Dundas, why on earth should she not marry him? Suppose she had married Mr. Home, and found out afterwards she was not really fond of him? One does not like to contemplate such things; there is a certain suspicion of coarseness even in the thought. I do not know what the view of the world may be, for the view of the world concerns me very little, but I feel quite sure that a girl is right in obeying the dictates of her own heart.”

  Lady Ellington longed to contradict all this; it was not in the least in accord with what she felt, and what she felt she was accustomed to state. Thus the suppression of it was not easy.

  “How lovely those lights on the hillside are,” said Lady Dover, in parenthesis. “Mr. Dennison ought to see them before he settles on the subject of his next picture. Yes, about Madge. I don’t know what other people think about it all, I only know what I think, and I am sure Dover agrees with me. It was a love match, was it not? What more do you want? Of course if Mr. Home had been a duke and Madge a girl without any position — —”

  “You mean it is just a question of degree?” asked Lady Ellington.

  “Ah, my dear — er — Margaret,” said Lady Dover, with a certain intonation of relief, because she was sure that her excellent memory had not played her false, “everything is a question of degree; there is nothing in the world into which circumstances, mitigating or the reverse, do not enter. How beautiful the rowan-berries are, I wish Mr. Dennison could see them. They would work into his foreground so well. I must take him to the end of the terrace to-morrow. Yes; but the mitigating circumstances are here so strong. She threw over Mr. Home, who is charming — I met him twice last year at dinner somewhere, and we asked him to lunch, only he could not come — and has married a man who is charming also, with whom she fell in love. How vivid his portraits are, too; I am going to be painted by him next spring, if he can find time. Almost too vivid, perhaps; they seem to jump out on you. But that is my view about the whole question. Supposing she had married Mr. Home, and had fallen in love afterwards! That sort of tragedy is so dreadful; such extraordinary cleverness is required to avoid all the horror of publicity. I could never survive publicity.”

  “But there is publicity as it is,” said Lady Ellington. “Poor Madge! What will people think of her? And of me?”

  Lady Dover throughout this conversation had given justification after justification for the importance that Lady Ellington attached to her verdict. She gave more now.

  “There is publicity, it is true,” she said; “but no sense of respectability has been offended. Of her, they will think that she fell in love and followed her instincts. Of you, they will think that you tried, like an excellent mother, to secure an excellent match for your daughter, but that your daughter chose for herself.”

  Lady Dover’s serene face grew a shade more shrewd.

  “You see, she has not married Tom or Dick or James,” she said. “Mr. Dundas, in fact, is a sufficiently important person. Was it that you meant, by the way, by saying it was a question of degree? I don’t know what his income is; it may be precarious. But he has great talent. And talent happens to be rather fashionable. I daresay it is only a phase, but after all one wants, if the sacrifice of no principle is involved, to be abreast with the world.”

  Now Lady Ellington could not possibly have been called a conceited woman, and her conviction that she was herself pretty well abreast of the world was founded on sober expe
rience. She was up to most things, in fact; the world, on the whole, did not worst her. Yet when Susan spoke of being abreast of the world, she was conscious that another plane altogether was indicated, a plane to which she had to struggle and aspire, whereas Susan moved quite easily and naturally on it. All the way from Golspie she had been labeling her hostess as conventional, but what if this conventionalism came out on the other side, so to speak, and was really the summit of worldly wisdom, a peak, not a mediocre plateau, where Susan and others walked gently about, as at some place of corrective waters, exchanging commonplaces. For Lady Dover, she was beginning to see, was not in the least conventional because it was the way of the world; she was conventional because she was made like that. It was the world, in fact, which was conventional because it was like Lady Dover, not Lady Dover who was conventional because she was like the world. Indeed she had spoken no more than the truth when she said the opinion of the world did not matter to her — it did not; she never had to take it into consideration, simply because it was quite certain to coincide with her own. And Lady Ellington found herself thinking that when Susan died her portrait ought really to be put in a stained glass window, a figure that should typify for all time the solid, respectable, virtuous aspects of the British aristocracy.

  They walked in silence for a few moments, for there was really nothing more to say on the subject. Then Lady Ellington took Susan’s arm and pressed it.

  “It is a great, great relief to me to know you feel like that,” she said, “and you have made my line with regard to Madge so clear. Poor Madge, I have been too hard on her, but the disappointment was so great. I could not help feeling for Philip, too.”

  “Of course one is always sorry for people in trouble,” said Lady Dover, “particularly if it is not their fault. I will write to Madge this morning. And now, do you know, it is almost time you went off to the river. I insist on your being Lady Salmon by this evening. Mr. Osborne is so quick and clever, is he not?”

  SEVENTEENTH

  LADY DOVER put into instant execution her promise to ask Madge and her husband to come and stay, and half an hour later set off with Mr. Dennison up the glen to the scene of his picture; the “original,” as she called it. As usual, in her interview with Lady Ellington she had behaved quite straightforwardly, and had expressed and acted on the view which she believed to be right, and though she could not help feeling that Lady Ellington had referred to her rather as an oracle, whose slightest word was a thing to be treasured up and reverently commented on, she was not naturally at all self-conscious, and did not dwell on the fact with any elation. Elation indeed she could not possibly have felt, since, had she been pressed to say how highly she valued Lady Ellington’s opinion, she would have been forced to confess that, without wishing to be unkind, she did not value it at all. Secretly, indeed, her estimate was that poor Margaret wanted very much to be a woman of the world, and only succeeded in being a worldly woman; she schemed (she had no doubt schemed in the matter of Madge’s marriage) and span threads in all directions, with the unfortunate result that she only succeeded in getting entangled in them herself. Lady Dover, on the other hand, never schemed at all; she walked calmly along a broad highroad and admired the flowers by the wayside. Consequently she was invariably free from preoccupations, and could talk with the artist about the exquisite lights and shadows on the hillside and the wonderful contrast of the purple heather against the golden gorse with sincerity and attention. It was quite possible also that they might see an eagle; one had been seen at the top of the glen several times that year.

  Lady Ellington as she went down with Gladys to the river felt more herself than she had felt ever since that stormy interview with Madge in the New Forest. A sense of imperfect mastery had begun then, terminating, on Madge’s visit to the studio, in a terribly certain conviction that she had no mastery at all. Madge, in fact, had made a fool of her, and her resentment at it was impotent. She felt, too, that the world very likely regarded her with a sort of amused pity, which was hard to bear. But she felt sure now after this interview that the world was going to forgive Madge and her husband, and welcome them to its midst. Her own course of conduct therefore was clear, she must quite certainly do the same, and if possible let it be understood that she had, though sorry for Philip, realised that this marriage was inevitable. Lady Dover had put this so plainly; how much better that their mutual love should be discovered before the irremediable mistake of Madge’s marriage with Philip had been made. And since she was a woman who never wasted time or anything else, she began immediately to lay the foundations of this remarkably imaginative structure before Gladys.

  “Poor Mr. Dennison,” she said, “I was so sorry for him at breakfast when he said he thought we had heard the last of Evelyn. I am always sorry for people who put their foot in it. But I suppose that would be the middle-class view of poor Madge’s marriage. It is easy to see that Mr. Dennison is not quite a gentleman.”

  This was so calm and glorious a disregard of all that she had previously said, thought, and felt, that the very completeness of it roused Gladys’s admiration. Lady Ellington took her previous attitude off, like a pair of gloves, just threw it into the gutter, and walked on. Gladys knew it must have been Lady Dover’s pronouncement that had caused this change, for she too was aware that the social Greenwich time was largely taken from Glen Callan, and had made a mental note, just as Madge’s mother had done, that she must also alter her own time by this. It clearly would be too ridiculous if all London welcomed them back with open arms, and only Madge’s family turned their backs on her. But she had a certain Puck-like sense of malice, particularly when she could exercise it on Lady Ellington, and she could not resist a little tap or two now.

  “I am so glad you take it like that,” she said, “and see it as Lady Dover does. At first, you know, I thought you were being too bitter about it, and really, to tell you the truth, I had no idea that you were taking Madge’s part. Dear Madge; I hope they will ask her soon, while I am still here.”

  “Of course I was bitter about it at first,” said Lady Ellington. “Who could help being, when all my plans were upset, and poor Philip Home was suffering too? I was more sorry for him than for anybody else. I had to tell him, you know, and had a terrible interview with him. But I soon saw that since Madge was not in love with him, but with Evelyn, it was a thousand times better that we should all suffer that purely temporary disturbance and worry than that she should be in the dreadfully false position of being married to one man while she was in love with another.”

  Gladys purred a rather feline approval.

  “How glad dear Madge must have been when you told her how you felt,” she said. “I wish I had been there when you made it up with her. Who is it who says something about the ‘blessings on the falling out which all the more endears’; it must have been quite like that.”

  Lady Ellington met this as well as she could, though it was rather awkward.

  “Yes, I think Madge will be perfectly happy,” she said, “now she finds that everyone is quite as nice as ever to her.”

  “Dear Madge, I never felt different to her,” said Gladys rather imprudently.

  Lady Ellington jumped on to this with extraordinary quickness and precision.

  “Ah, I am glad to know that,” she said, “because I now also know that Lady Taverner must have simply invented a quantity of things that she said you had said to her about it. I felt sure you could not have been so unkind.”

  So the honours on the whole were pretty well divided; each of them saw through the other, and since each determined to write to Madge that night, it was highly likely that Madge would see through them both.

  Mr. Osborne proved to be a true prophet, and it was indeed Lady Salmon and Lady Grilse who came back from the river about tea-time. He had the good luck to be in the hall when they returned, and preceded Lady Ellington to the drawing-room, where he threw open the door for her to enter in the manner of a butler, and announced loudly —

/>   “Lady Salmon Ellington, my lady.”

  Lady Grilse also had vindicated her name again, and when after tea they played the game at which one person goes out of the room, and on return has to guess by mere “Yes” or “No” what has been thought of, Mr. Osborne, on learning that they had thought of fish, instantly guessed “Salmon,” which proved to be right. Satisfactory reports also came from the grouse shooters; the two ladies had had a charming drive; Mr. Dennison had caught an effect of a highly pleasing kind, and though Lord Ellington had missed his stag, it was felt that Mr. Osborne was in tune with the general cheerfulness when he said that after all that was next best to hitting it. Indeed Mr. Osborne was in extremely fine form altogether, and Lady Dover, as she went upstairs with his wife at about half-past six, as it was refreshing after the day in the air to lie down for an hour or so before dinner, said that she knew no one so entertaining as her husband. Then, since Mrs. Dennison was with them, she added:

  “And Mr. Dennison has promised to show us a new conjuring trick this evening. I can’t think how he does them. So very clever. And what a resource in the evening; I am sure I should never be dull if he would conjure for me always after dinner.”

  It was during this last week of August, which saw this party at Glen Callan, that in point of chronology Philip broke down as recorded, and went to the Hermit in the New Forest. Madge and Evelyn, however, less lucky in the matter of locality, had to remain all the month in London, without any immediate prospect of getting away. That week at Le Touquet, with its motor-car, its suite of rooms, and Evelyn’s serene and complete disregard of all questions connected however remotely with finance, had been somewhat alarmingly expensive, and his ill-judged selling out of his Metiekull shares when things were absolutely at their worst had not mended matters. He had taken Madge completely into his confidence, and as it was evidently likely that there would soon be an embarrassing lack of funds, she had insisted on their immediate return to London, where they would be anyhow rent free in Evelyn’s house in the King’s Road, and could, as he cheerfully suggested, live on lentils like the Hermit. But on arrival in London the hall table was discovered to be literally smothered in bills, chiefly “to account rendered,” for Evelyn in the insouciance of the comfortable bachelor income which his pictures brought him in, had certainly for a year past thrown into the fire anything of a bill-nature. Nothing had ever been further from his thoughts than not to pay, but the knowledge that he could, by a strange but almost universal trait in human nature, had made him not bother to do so. But, now, however, by the converse of this law, which holds equally true, as soon as it was doubtful whether he could stand debt free, it became quite essential to his interior peace of mind that he should do so. This instinct appealed also to Madge, and after a dismal morning of adding up, the whole position was revealed. Every penny could be paid with the jetsam of Metiekull, and there was left over — his total assets except his hand and his eye — the sum of forty-three pounds. It was clearly necessary, therefore, to stop in London, to be extremely economical, and to hope that the autumn would bring sitters. Lady Taverner, at any rate, was assured, and Evelyn found himself thinking of that pink face and butter-coloured hair with almost affection.