by E. F. Benson
Elizabeth cared little for either the approval or condemnation of the world in general. The thought of it was remote and stifled and insignificant. But it was Edward who called to her, called loud, called closely and low, and she must be deaf not to listen to him, not hear him even. At whatever cost she had to approve of herself.
Black, empty aching, an intolerable loneliness. She had but one desire, apart from the desire of her heart, and that was to escape from it all, to go away as quickly as possible, to be out of sight of what she might not contemplate. Far away, across leagues of hot ocean and miles of plain baking from the summer solstice, was her father. No one else in the world did she want to see, to no one else — if even to him — could she pour out her woe. He would comprehend, would approve, she knew, of all she had done, not blaming her for letting love so completely envelop her, not praising her rejection of it, but simply seeing even as she had seen, in loneliness and heart’s anguish, that there was no other course possible. She knew that as thoroughly as if she had already opened her whole heart to him.
There was a letter already written which she had not yet posted; now she opened it and added a postscript: “Father, dear,” she wrote, “I am awfully — awfully unhappy, and can’t write to you about it. But when you get this, please send me a telegram saying you want me home at once. Trust me that this is wiser. Don’t delay, dear daddy.”
The pen dropped from her fingers after she had re-directed her letter, and she sat quite still looking blankly at it. She had told Edith she did not love Edward, that she had never thought of him like that. If there could be degrees in this abject wretchedness, hers was a depth unplumbable. Yet this colossal lie seemed to her necessary. Edith, believing that her cousin loved Edward, yet refused to release him of her own will. So she was to have him, she must be given what was already hers, handsomely, largely. It would be wicked, even at the cost of this denial, to give him her with a stab, so to speak.
Emptiness, utter loneliness self-ordained. She must tell somebody about her misery; she must pour out her unshared grief, for the burden of it was intolerable. With dry blind eyes, with the groping instinct to seek, just to seek, she threw herself on her knees by her bed. She knew not what or whom she sought; there was just this blind unerring instinct in her soul, the instinct of the homing pigeon.
Mrs. Hancock put up her parasol when the three cushions were perfectly adjusted, and the car slid slowly forward.
“I think we shall have time to go round by the Old Mill,” she said, “though we are a little late in starting. I wonder, Elizabeth, if you could make an effort to be more punctual, dear. I don’t think there is a person in the world who hates blaming people as much as I do, so I don’t want or mean to blame you. I only ask you to make a little effort. It is so easy to form a habit, and while you are about it you might just as well form the habit of punctuality as of unpunctuality.”
“I am so sorry, Aunt Julia,” said she. “I — I wasn’t thinking about the time.”
“No, dear, that is just it. I want you to think about the time a little more. There is just a little touch of selfishness and inconsiderateness in keeping other people waiting, and selfishness is so horrible, is it not? Edith is never unpunctual, though all the time her ankle was bad she got downstairs very slowly. But she allowed for that. What was the engrossing employment to-day that kept you?”
“I was saying my prayers, Aunt Julia, At least, I was trying to.”
Mrs. Hancock laid her hand on Elizabeth’s.
“My dear, that is a very good reason,” she said, “though I am afraid it means that you forgot to say them when you got up. It’s a very good plan, Elizabeth, to say them the moment you get out of bed. Then they are off your mind. Oh, what a beautiful fresh air there is this morning! I think we might almost have my window half down, and yours quite down. Your prayers, yes. And to think that when you came you didn’t want to go to church at all. But I felt sure that Mr. Martin — why, there he is, do you see, in a red coat, playing golf? Fancy, what a coincidence! He is dining with us to-night, and I must be sure to tell him that we saw him just the very moment that I was speaking of him. But the only way to get through the day’s work is to do everything punctually, prayers and all. Then when bedtime comes you are ready for it, with nothing left undone to keep you awake. And now, my dear, I have a great deal to tell you, and I’m sure I look forward to doing so. It is almost as great a pleasure to me as it will be to you to hear about all the plans I have made for you.”
Mrs. Hancock had settled that her climax was to be Egypt. The patience-table perhaps was the least sensational of the benefits, and she was going to begin with that.
“I have often noticed lately, dear,” she said, “what an interest you take in my patience, so much so indeed, Elizabeth, that we’ve had not a note of music in the evening for a week past, though I’ve thought sometimes that I have seen Edward looking at the piano as if he would like to hear how you are getting on. Look, there is the Old Mill. Will you tell Denton to stop, so that we can enjoy looking at it? So I thought to myself the other night, or perhaps a little bird whispered it to me, that you would like to play patience, too, in the evening. And so you shall, dear. You shall have my patience-table all for your very own, and I will get another one for myself. Mind, Elizabeth, it is not lent you to use only as you use the other things in the house, but it is quite yours, the moment my other table comes from the stores. You may take it back to India if you wish, when you go. When you go.”
“Oh, that is kind, dear Aunt Julia,” said the girl. “But why should you give it me, and go to the expense of a new one? I enjoy seeing you play just as much as I should enjoy playing myself.”
Mrs. Hancock wondered if this was really true. Her generosity about taking the table to India, which so neatly introduced the next topic, had been an unpremeditated flash. Of course, if Elizabeth did not want to play patience, there was no kind of reason for getting a new table. But luckily at this moment she remembered “King of Mexico,” which, employing four packs, could not be properly laid out on the table she at present used.
“My dear, I am determined you shall have a table of your own,” she said, “to take to India with you if you wish. And perhaps you noticed that I said ‘when you go,’ and repeated it. That brings me on to my second plan. I should enjoy, dear, I should really enjoy your stopping on here after Edith and Edward are married; then you will no longer share the little treats, like having a drive in my motor, with Edith, but you can come out in it whenever I go, twice a day if you like. And if you like, you shall have Edith’s room, and I shall make Mrs. Williams and Lind and all of them quite understand that you are to take Edith’s place. You shan’t be a visitor any more. Arundel shall be your English home.”
“Oh, Aunt Julia —— !” began Elizabeth.
“No; wait a minute. You shall have all my plans together. Here you will be all October, with your own patience-table, and Edith’s room, until I go to Egypt in November. And then, and then, my dear, you shall come with me. I have written to your father, and we have quite arranged it. You will be absolutely one of our party, and when Edith and Edward join us, as they will do at Cairo — oh, look at those starlings, what a quantity! — when they join us at Cairo we will all go up the Nile together and see everything there is to be seen. How busy we shall be, you and I, all October, my dear, reading all sorts of learned books; I am sure you will read aloud very well with a little practice. We shall be quite a pair of blue-stockings when we meet Edith and Edward again, and be able to tell them all sorts of interesting things about the Greeks and ancient Egyptians. We will take your patience-table with us, for it shuts up more conveniently than any table I have ever seen, and I dare say I shall often ask you for the loan of it, if you will be so kind as to lend it me. And then we shall all come down the Nile together, such a happy party, and I know very well, dear Elizabeth, that when we come to part, and you go on to India from wherever it is that the boats call, I for one shall miss you very muc
h indeed.”
Mrs. Hancock had warmed herself up into the most pleasurable glow of generosity, and felt that all these wonderful plans, which, as a matter of fact, had been made solely with a view to her own comfort, were entirely due to her altruistic desire for Elizabeth’s delight. Her self-deception was complete and triumphant; she had for the time quite lost sight of the undoubted fact that she had thought of herself and herself only in the making of them. She had secured an excuse for a new patience-table, a companion during what would have otherwise been a month of loneliness, and, at no expense to herself, of somebody who would look after her in Egypt and be devoted to her comfort. She fully expected a burst of gratitude, a rapturous and scarcely credulous assent from the girl.
Elizabeth sat quite silent for a moment.
“Oh, Aunt Julia, it is sweet of you,” she said, “but I think it is all quite impossible. I must go back to India; I must get back to father.”
Aunt Julia still glowed.
“My dear, your father has made up his mind to do without you and let you enjoy yourself,” she said. “I wrote to him about it, oh, weeks ago, telling him not to allude to it at all to you, but that I would tell you. He will rejoice in your happiness as much as I.”
Elizabeth clasped her hands together on her knee.
“Oh, I can’t, I can’t!” she said. “But thank you ever so much, Aunt Julia. Indeed, I wrote to father only to-day, saying that I wanted to come back to him quite soon, sooner than I had planned. I can’t explain. You have been so kind to me, I know, but I must go back to India as soon as possible. Simply that.”
Mrs. Hancock recognized the earnestness of the girl’s tone, and all the pleasure and glow faded from her face.
“Really, I think your words do require some explanation,” she said. “To think of me so busy planning and contriving for your pleasure, and you saying that you don’t want any of my plans! Yes, Denton, drive on. We have looked at the Old Mill long enough. I think you ought to tell me what it all means, Elizabeth.”
“I can’t tell you,” said she. “Try to think it means nothing, or that it means only just what I have said. It does mean that. I want to go back to India. If it was possible I would go back to-day. I want to see father. I have been a long time away from him, and though you and — and Edith and Edward are so kind I miss him dreadfully. I am homesick; I want to get back.”
Mrs. Hancock’s own beautiful architectural designs for Elizabeth’s happiness tumbled in ruins, and Elizabeth’s notions of replacing them did not seem in the least satisfactory. She who avowedly had “planned and contrived” for this end found herself accusing the girl of the most barefaced selfishness when she stated what she really wanted. Apparently she thought about nothing but herself.
“Well, all I can say at present,” said Mrs. Hancock, “is that I am dreadfully disappointed and grieved.”
“Yes, I am sorry,” put in Elizabeth, “but — but it is quite impossible. You mustn’t think I am ungrateful, Aunt Julia.”
“I do not think you can expect me to praise you for your gratitude,” said Mrs. Hancock.
“No. I don’t want praise; I don’t deserve it. But I want to go back to father.”
Mrs. Hancock’s sense of ill-usage, of having her kindness met by black ingratitude, rankled and grew. This was worse, much worse, than the painful case of the housemaid, who suited her so well, going away from her service to be married. Indeed, that misguided creature — the marriage did not turn out very happily, and Mrs. Hancock was sure she didn’t wonder — the cause of so many bitter memories, appeared now as a perfect angel in comparison.
“I must say that I cannot consider this a pretty return for all the indulgences I have showered on you,” she said. “I have treated you like my own daughter, Elizabeth, with the piano always ready dusted for you, and the most expensive motor always whirling you about the country, wherever you like to go, and the new table for your patience, and never a thing asked of you in return till I suggest that you should keep me company during October, and this you flatly refuse. And what your father will say I don’t know, with all his kindness in paying for your tour in Egypt, when we settled between us to let you come with me all up the Nile, at a great deal of expense. And now all you can say is that you don’t want to go, and can’t explain why. And here was I thinking of ordering books on Egypt from the London library this very afternoon, and even planning going up to London some day this week to make sure of getting places in the sleeping-car to Marseilles. And you can’t explain!”
Elizabeth felt suddenly goaded to exasperation at this child’s babble of books from the library and tickets for the sleeping-car. It was round such things as these that her aunt’s emotions clung like swarming bees around their queen. She felt a wild desire to supply Aunt Julia with something real to think about, something that would really pierce through those coils of comfort-padding that wrapped her up as in eiderdown quilts. At present all that ever reached her was a slight disarrangement, a minute tweaking of one of her quilts. Or if by years of habit they were too firmly tucked round her, it would be something to let her see that others were not so grossly wadded against the world, against reality.
“I will explain if you like,” she said quickly, and almost smiled to see Aunt Julia huddling her quilts round her, clutching them with eager fingers, dreading lest they should be taken from her by cruel and inconsiderate hands.
“My dear, you haven’t given me your confidence voluntarily,” she said in a great hurry, “and I am the last person in the world to ask for confidence when it is not freely given. Dear Edith has always told me everything, but that is no reason why you should — —”
“Do you mean that Edith has told you about this?” asked the girl.
“About your inexplicable rejection of all my plans for you, including the patience-table? No, certainly not. That, I imagine, concerns you. My dear Edith would be the last to betray what seems to be a secret — —”
Elizabeth broke in again.
“But I am offering not to make a secret of it from you,” she said.
Mrs. Hancock turned an almost imploring face to her.
“No, Elizabeth,” she said. “You have not come to me with it of your own accord, and I was quite wrong to hint that you owed me an explanation. If I have hinted so I withdraw it. Look, there is Mr. Beaumont with his butterfly-net. Let us be silent for a little and collect ourselves again; our talk was getting very wild and uncomfortable. Would you kindly put your window a shade more up?”
Mrs. Hancock regarded the view with a severe and compressed face, into which there stole by degrees an expression of relief. She felt that she had dealt with this threatening situation in an extremely tactful manner. Elizabeth had not chosen to confide in her, and she had put, so she told herself, all, all her natural curiosity aside and refused to hear the secret which had not voluntarily been made known to her. That waiving of her personal feelings in the matter had, as usual, its immediate rewards, for she had averted the risk of hearing something thoroughly uncomfortable. She dismissed that consideration, and in the silence for which she had asked devoted herself to the pained contemplation of Elizabeth’s selfishness, which had so much surprised and grieved her. Hitherto she had not thought Elizabeth at all selfish, except in the matter of unpunctuality, and the discovery was a great blow to her. She had quite made up her mind that the girl would jump at those delightful proposals, which had been the fruit of so much thought. About Egypt she did not care so particularly, but she felt terribly blank at the prospect of a lonely October. With Elizabeth taking a real solid interest in patience, with the interval between tea and dinner filled in by readings about the ancient Egyptians, and with a companion for the two daily motor drives, she had felt really quite resigned to losing Edith, since on their return from Egypt she would be living again next door, and of course would be only too delighted to enjoy her mother’s companionship during Edward’s daily absence in the City. And now there had come this earthquake, upsetting
everything. There was a proverb that misfortunes never come singly, and she felt an indefinable dread that Filson would want to marry next, or Mrs. Williams threaten to leave her. Of course, she could raise Mrs. Williams’s wages again to stem this tide of disaster, but if Filson wanted to marry —— No doubt she could try the effect of raising Filson’s wages, and could point to the awful fate of the housemaid, but even that might not prove sufficient if Filson loved some hypothetical young man very much. Then she tried to cling to the gospel of Mr. Martin, and determined not to dwell on these unnerving possibilities.
Meantime, Elizabeth sat silent (as requested) by her, and the kindliness of Mrs. Hancock, which existed in large crude quantities, and her affection for the girl, which in its own way was perfectly genuine, came to her aid. However startling and deplorable Elizabeth’s selfishness was, she was sorry for whatever might be the trouble that lay at the root of it, and, provided only that trouble was not confided to her, was willing and eager to do her best to alleviate it. Secretly she guessed that Edward was concerned in it; she guessed also that the girl’s affections were concerned in it. She rejected without difficulty that Elizabeth had conceived a hopeless passion for Mr. Beaumont, or an illicit one for Mr. Martin, and she inferred that Elizabeth’s affections and Edward were synonymous terms. But that was only a guess — she hastened to assure herself of that — and might really be as insubstantial as she hoped was the shattering notion that Filson was engaged in a love affair, and she shut the door on it. There was poor Elizabeth’s trouble safely locked up, and she wondered how she could help her. She turned to the girl.
