by E. F. Benson
“But, my dear, no wonder you are tired,” she said. “Michael, can’t anybody help? It isn’t right you should do everything.”
He shook his head, smiling.
“They can’t help,” he said. “I’m the only person who can help her. And I—”
He stood up, bracing mind and body.
“And I’m so brutally proud of it,” he said. “She wants me. Well, that’s a lot for a son to be able to say. Sylvia, I would give anything to keep her.”
Still he was not thinking of her, and knowing that, she came close to him and put her arm in his. She longed to give him some feeling of comradeship. She could be sisterly to him over this without suggesting to him what she could not be to him. Her instinct had divined right, and she felt the answering pressure of his elbow that acknowledged her sympathy, welcomed it, and thought no more about it.
“You are giving everything to keep her,” she said. “You are giving yourself. What further gift is there, Michael?”
He kept her arm close pressed by him, and she knew by the frankness of that holding caress he was thinking of her still either not at all, or, she hoped, as a comrade who could perhaps be of assistance to courage and clear-sightedness in difficult hours. She wanted to be no more than that to him just now; it was the most she could do for him, but with a desire, the most acute she had ever felt for him, she wanted him to accept that — to take her comradeship as he would have surely taken her brother’s. Once, in the last intimate moments they had had together, he had refused to accept that attitude from her — had felt it a relationship altogether impossible. She had seen his point of view, and recognised the justice of the embarrassment. Now, very simply but very eagerly, she hoped, as with some tugging strain, that he would not reject it. She knew she had missed this brother, who had refused to be brother to her. But he had been about his own business, and he had been doing his own business, with a quiet splendour that drew her eyes to him, and as they stood there, thus linked, she wondered if her heart was following. . . . She had seen, last December, how reasonable it was of him to refuse this domestic sort of intimacy with her; now, she found herself intensely longing that he would not persist in his refusal.
Suddenly Michael awoke to the fact of her presence, and abruptly he moved away from her.
“Thanks, Sylvia,” he said. “I know I have your — your good wishes. But — well, I am sure you understand.”
She understood perfectly well. And the understanding of it cut her to the quick.
“Have you got any right to behave like that to me, Michael?” she asked. “What have I done that you should treat me quite like that?”
He looked at her, completely recalled in mind to her alone. All the hopes and desires of the autumn smote him with encompassing blows.
“Yes, every right,” he said. “I wasn’t heeding you. I only thought of my mother, and the fact that there was a very dear friend by me. And then I came to myself: I remembered who the friend was.”
They stood there in silence, apart, for a moment. Then Michael came closer. The desire for human sympathy, and that the sympathy he most longed for, gripped him again.
“I’m a brute,” he said. “It was awfully nice of you to — to offer me that. I accept it so gladly. I’m wretchedly anxious.”
He looked up at her.
“Take my arm again,” he said.
She felt the crook of his elbow tighten again on her wrist. She had not known before how much she prized that.
“But are you sure you are right in being anxious, Mike?” she asked. “Isn’t it perhaps your own tired nerves that make you anxious?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been tired a long time, you see, and I never felt about my mother like this. She has been so bright and content all day, and yet there were little lapses, if you understand. It was as if she knew: she said good-bye to the lake and the jolly moor-hens and the grass. And her nurse thinks so, too. She called me out of the room just now to tell me that. . . . I don’t know why I should tell you these depressing things.”
“Don’t you?” she asked. “But I do. It’s because you know I care. Otherwise you wouldn’t tell me: you couldn’t.”
For a moment the balance quavered in his mind between Sylvia the beloved and Sylvia the friend. It inclined to the friend.
“Yes, that’s why,” he said. “And I reproach myself, you know. All these years I might, if I had tried harder, have been something to my mother. I might have managed it. I thought — at least I felt — that she didn’t encourage me. But I was a beast to have been discouraged. And now her wanting me has come just when it isn’t her unclouded self that wants me. It’s as if — as if it had been raining all day, and just on sunset there comes a gleam in the west. And so soon after it’s night.”
“You made the gleam,” said Sylvia.
“But so late; so awfully late.”
Suddenly he stood stiff, listening to some sound which at present she did not hear. It sounded a little louder, and her ears caught the running of footsteps on the stairs outside. Next moment the door opened, and Lady Ashbridge’s maid put in a pale face.
“Will you go to her ladyship, my lord?” she said. “Her nurse wants you. She told me to telephone to Sir James.”
Sylvia moved with him, not disengaging her arm, towards the door.
“Michael, may I wait?” she said. “You might want me, you know. Please let me wait.”
Lady Ashbridge’s room was on the floor above, and Michael ran up the intervening stairs three at a time. He knocked and entered and wondered why he had been sent for, for she was sitting quietly on her sofa near the window. But he noticed that Nurse Baker stood very close to her. Otherwise there was nothing that was in any way out of the ordinary.
“And here he is,” said the nurse reassuringly as he entered.
Lady Ashbridge turned towards the door as Michael came in, and when he met her eyes he knew why he had been sent for, why at this moment Sir James was being summoned. For she looked at him not with the clouded eyes of affection, not with the mother-spirit striving to break through the shrouding trouble of her brain, but with eyes of blank non-recognition. She saw him with the bodily organs of her vision, but the picture of him was conveyed no further: there was a blank wall behind her eyes.
Michael did not hesitate. It was possible that he still might be something to her, that he, his presence, might penetrate.
“But you are not resting, mother,” he said. “Why are you sitting up? I came to talk to you, as I said I would, while you rested.”
Suddenly into those blank, irresponsive eyes there leaped recognition. He saw the pupils contract as they focused themselves on him, and hand in hand with recognition there leaped into them hate. Instantly that was veiled again. But it had been there, and now it was not banished; it lurked behind in the shadows, crouching and waiting.
She answered him at once, but in a voice that was quite toneless. It seemed like that of a child repeating a lesson which it had learned by heart, and could be pronounced while it was thinking of something quite different.
“I was waiting till you came, my dear,” she said. “Now I will lie down. Come and sit by me, Michael.”
She watched him narrowly while she spoke, then gave a quick glance at her nurse, as if to see that they were not making signals to each other. There was an easy chair just behind her head, and as Michael wheeled it up near her sofa, he looked at the nurse. She moved her hand slightly towards the left, and interpreting this, he moved the chair a little to the left, so that he would not sit, as he had intended, quite close to the sofa.
“And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?” asked Michael.
She looked at him sideways and slowly. Then again, as if recollecting a task she had committed to memory, she answered.
“Yes, so much,” she said. “All the trees and the birds and the sunshine. I enjoyed them so much.”
She paused a moment.
“Bring your chair a lit
tle closer, my darling,” she said. “You are so far off. And why do you wait, nurse? I will call you if I want you.”
Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror. He understood quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother, and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in those most nearly allied to them. Physically, on the material plane, he had no fear at all.
He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it closer, but he came actually no nearer her.
“Why don’t you go away, nurse?” said Lady Ashbridge, “and leave my son and me to talk about our nice day in the country?”
Nurse Baker answered quite naturally.
“I want to talk, too, my lady,” she said. “I went with you and Lord Comber. We all enjoyed it together.”
It seemed to Michael that his mother made some violent effort towards self-control. He saw one of her hands that were lying on her knee clench itself, so that the knuckles stood out white.
“Yes, we will all talk together, then,” she said. “Or — er — shall I have a little doze first? I am rather sleepy with so much pleasant air. And you are sleepy, too, are you not, Michael? Yes, I see you look sleepy. Shall we have a little nap, as I often do after tea? Then, when I am fresh again, you shall come back, nurse, and we will talk over our pleasant day.”
When he entered the room, Michael had not quite closed the door, and now, as half an hour before, he heard steps on the stairs. A moment afterwards his mother heard them too.
“What is that?” she said. “Who is coming now to disturb me, just when I wanted to have a nap?”
There came a knock at the door. Nurse Baker did not move her head, but continued watching her patient, with hands ready to act.
“Come in,” she said, not looking round.
Lady Ashbridge’s face was towards the door. As Sir James entered, she suddenly sprang up, and in her right hand that lay beside her was a knife, which she had no doubt taken from the tea-table when she came upstairs. She turned swiftly towards Michael, and stabbed at him with it.
“It’s a trap,” she cried. “You’ve led me into a trap. They are going to take me away.”
Michael had thrown up his arm to shield his head. The blow fell between shoulder and elbow, and he felt the edge of the knife grate on his bone.
And from deep in his heart sprang the leaping fountains of compassion and love and yearning pity.
CHAPTER XII
Michael was sitting in the big studio at the Falbes’ house late one afternoon at the end of June, and the warmth and murmur of the full-blown summer filled the air. The day had so far declined that the rays of the sun, level in its setting, poured slantingly in through the big window to the north, and shining through the foliage of the plane-trees outside made a diaper of rosy illuminated spots and angled shadows on the whitewashed wall. As the leaves stirred in the evening breeze, this pattern shifted and twinkled; now, as the wind blew aside a bunch of foliage, a lake of rosy gold would spring up on the wall; then, as the breath of movement died, the green shadows grew thicker again faintly stirring. Through the window to the south, which Hermann had caused to be cut there, since the studio was not used for painting purposes, Michael could see into the patch of high-walled garden, where Mrs. Falbe was sitting in a low basket chair, completely absorbed in a book of high-born and ludicrous adventures. She had made a mild attempt when she found that Michael intended to wait for Sylvia’s return to entertain him till she came; but, with a little oblique encouragement, remarking on the beauty and warmth of the evening, and the pleasure of sitting out of doors, Michael had induced her to go out again, and leave him alone in the studio, free to live over again that which, twenty-four hours ago, had changed life for him.
He reconstructed it as he sat on the sofa and dwelt on the pearl-moments of it. Just this time yesterday he had come in and found Sylvia alone. She had got up, he remembered, to give him greeting, and just opposite the fireplace they had come face to face. She held in her hand a small white rose which she had plucked in the tiny garden here in the middle of London. It was not a very fine specimen, but it was a rose, and she had said in answer to his depreciatory glance: “But you must see it when I have washed it. One has to wash London flowers.”
Then . . . the miracle happened. Michael, with the hand that had just taken hers, stroked a petal of this prized vegetable, with no thought in his mind stronger than the thoughts that had been indigenous there since Christmas. As his finger first touched the rim of the town-bred petals, undersized yet not quite lacking in “rose-quality,” he had intended nothing more than to salute the flower, as Sylvia made her apology for it. “One has to wash London flowers.” But as he touched it he looked up at her, and the quiet, usual song of his thoughts towards her grew suddenly loud and stupefyingly sweet. It was as if from the vacant hive-door the bees swarmed. In her eyes, as they met his, he thought he saw an expectancy, a welcome, and his hand, instead of stroking the rose-petals, closed on the rose and on the hand that held it, and kept them close imprisoned and strongly gripped. He could not remember if he had spoken any word, but he had seen that in her face which rendered all speech unnecessary, and, knowing in the bones and the blood of him that he was right, he kissed her. And then she had said, “Yes, Michael.”
His hand still was tight on hers that held the crumpled rose, and when he opened it, lover-like, to stroke and kiss it, there was a spot of blood in the palm of it, where a rose-thorn had pricked her, just one drop of Sylvia’s blood. As he kissed it, he had wiped it away with the tip of his tongue between his lips, and she smiling had said, “Oh, Michael, how silly!”
They had sat together on the sofa where this afternoon he sat alone waiting for her. Every moment of that half hour was as distinct as the outline of trees and hills just before a storm, and yet it was still entirely dream-like. He knew it had happened, for nothing but the happening of it would account now for the fact of himself; but, though there was nothing in the world so true, there was nothing so incredible. Yet it was all as clean-cut in his mind as etched lines, and round each line sprang flowers and singing birds. For a long space there was silence after they had sat down, and then she said, “I think I always loved you, Michael, only I didn’t know it. . . .” Thereafter, foolish love talk: he had claimed a superiority there, for he had always loved her and had always known it. Much time had been wasted owing to her ignorance . . . she ought to have known. But all the time that existed was theirs now. In all the world there was no more time than what they had. The crumpled rose had its petals rehabilitated, the thorn that had pricked her was peeled off. They wondered if Hermann had come in yet. Then, by some vague process of locomotion, they found themselves at the piano, and with her arm around his neck Sylvia has whispered half a verse of the song of herself. . . .
They became a little more definite over lover-confessions. Michael had, so to speak, nothing to confess: he had loved all along — he had wanted her all along; there never had been the least pretence or nonsense about it. Her path was a little more difficult to trace, but once it had been traversed it was clear enough. She had liked him always; she had felt sister-like from the moment when Hermann brought him to the house, and sister-like she had continued to feel, even when Michael had definitely declared there was “no thoroughfare” there. She had missed that relationship when it stopped: she did not mind telling him that now, since it was abandoned by them both; but not for the world would she have confessed before that she had missed it. She had loved being asked to come and see his mother, and it was during those visits that she had helped to pile the barricade across the “sister-thoroughfare” with her own hands. She began to share Michael’s sense of the impossibility of that road. They could not walk down it together, for they had to be either more or less to each other than that. And, during these visits, she
had begun to understand (and her face a little hid itself) what Michael’s love meant. She saw it manifested towards his mother; she was taught by it; she learned it; and, she supposed, she loved it. Anyhow, having seen it, she could not want Michael as a brother any longer, and if he still wanted anything else, she supposed (so she supposed) that some time he would mention that fact. Yes: she began to hope that he would not be very long about it. . . .
Michael went over this very deliberately as he sat waiting for her twenty-four hours later. He rehearsed this moment and that over and over again: in mind he followed himself and Sylvia across to the piano, not hurrying their steps, and going through the verse of the song she sang at the pace at which she actually sang it. And, as he dreamed and recollected, he heard a little stir in the quiet house, and Sylvia came.
They met just as they met yesterday in front of the fireplace.
“Oh, Michael, have you been waiting long?” she said.
“Yes, hours, or perhaps a couple of minutes. I don’t know.”
“Ah, but which? If hours, I shall apologise, and then excuse myself by saying that you must have come earlier than you intended. If minutes I shall praise myself for being so exceedingly punctual.”
“Minutes, then,” said he. “I’ll praise you instead. Praise is more convincing if somebody else does it.”
“Yes, but you aren’t somebody else. Now be sensible. Have you done all the things you told me you were going to do?”
“Yes.”
Sylvia released her hands from his.
“Tell me, then,” she said. “You’ve seen your father?”
There was no cloud on Michael’s face. There was such sunlight where his soul sat that no shadow could fall across it.
“Oh, yes, I saw him,” he said.
He captured Sylvia’s hand again.
“And what is more he saw me, so to speak,” he said. “He realised that I had an existence independent of him. I used to be a — a sort of clock to him; he could put its hands to point to any hour he chose. Well, he has realised — he has really — that I am ticking along on my own account. He was quite respectful, not only to me, which doesn’t matter, but to you — which does.” Michael laughed, as he plaited his fingers in with hers.
