The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “Reggie looked very like another victim last night,” said the other.

  Eva looked away.

  “Did he—was he very unhappy about it?” she asked.

  “Not too unhappy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From what I know of him,” said Mrs. Davenport, “especially since this sudden change has come, if you speak now, you may make the whole difference to him. Make him angry and sore, and then let him go off to Aix, and I think Gertrude will do the rest. I wonder if she will guess what has happened. I hope not.”

  “How she will hate me!” murmured Eva, “and so will Reggie. It is really hard to see what I am to gain by the arrangement.”

  “Ah! Don’t go back now,” entreated Mrs. Davenport. “See, I have no pride left. I implore you to do what I ask. You are very powerful; I know your power too well, and so does Reggie, God help him!”

  “I wonder if it is really better to be unselfish than selfish,” mused Eva, more to herself than to Mrs. Davenport, “or to try to do good at all. We are so very short sighted that we may be doing the worst thing possible. Who were those very ingenious people who did harm when they wanted to, in order that good might follow? Anyhow, if I do this, I shall not have chosen the selfish course. I suppose there will be an imperishable reward for me somewhere. Even so, perhaps I am really doing the selfish thing by doing as you ask me; it all depends, doesn’t it, on how much I like him? whether I like him enough to be unselfish; whether the burden of being selfish wouldn’t be harder to bear than the burden of being unselfish.”

  “I know how little I matter to you personally,” said Mrs. Davenport, “but you will know at least that I think you have done a very noble thing, something of which not many are capable; something it was very hard for you to do.”

  “Ah! You don’t understand me a bit,” broke out Eva. “I assure you that no one’s opinion has an atom of weight with me. I fear evil report as little as I covet good. Let me think for a few moments.”

  Mrs. Davenport was silent; she hardly heard Eva’s last speech, for all her thoughts were on her possible decision. That she had not dismissed her at once, had not refused to see her, she felt was a favourable sign. Eva, she knew, was quite capable, in spite of a certain intimacy between them, of having sent a message that she saw no one in the morning. Mrs. Davenport feared her and her cold, hard power, as she feared nothing else in the world. She sat there pale, almost trembling, while Eva passed slowly up and down the room, for a few minutes. But at the end of one of these turns, when she was by the door, she passed out, and Mrs. Davenport heard her step ascending the stairs. She waited there while the minute hand crept round the dial of the great bronze clock on the mantelpiece, and it was half-an-hour before Eva appeared again, with a large, unsealed envelope in her hand. She looked very weary, but as faultlessly beautiful as ever.

  “I have not sealed it,” she said, “because I thought you might like to read it, and while I am about it I might as well do it handsomely. At the same time, I would sooner you did not read it, but I shall neither blame you nor try to dissuade you if you wish to. With it is Reggie’s photo—the one he gave me. You need not take them. Will you read it? No? Then I will send a man with it at once, as you don’t care to look at the letter. There is no reason why you should be turned into a penny post because your son has called me a wicked woman. He was quite right, by the way—perfectly right. I—”

  Eva stopped suddenly, for there was that tremor in her voice which had been there once before at this interview.

  “I will not betray myself,” she determined, biting her lip, in a splendid effort to keep command over herself.

  “There is just one thing that I should like to ask you,” she went on almost at once; “send me a line now and then, to tell me about Reggie, and whether it is all right between him and the girl. I liked him very much, you know, and I shall never see him again, I suppose.”

  Mrs. Davenport was much moved. She had guessed, and guessed correctly, that Reggie would not be the only sufferer, and that Eva had behaved heroically, and tears partly of relief, but partly of gratitude and admiration, started to her eyes.

  “God bless you for what you have done!” she whispered. “I can say no more than that.”

  The tension broke.

  “Leave me quickly,” cried Eva, as the large, painful sobs began to break from her throat. “Go at once!”

  “Eva, Eva,” cried Mrs. Davenport, stretching out her hands to her.

  “Go—go at once!” cried the other.

  She turned rapidly from her, and Mrs. Davenport, without another word, left the room. She just saw Eva sink in the arm-chair she had been occupying before, and bury her face in her hands. Mrs. Davenport closed the door quietly and went out.

  She had left behind her, and she knew it, a sorrow greater and more desolate than Reggie’s weaker nature would ever know. She remembered Percy’s prediction, that some day Eva “would do something sublimely unselfish, and that would be when she fell in love.”

  It was still only about mid-day when she left the house, and she had purposely said “Good-bye” to Reggie before she went, for, presupposing the success of her expedition, of which Reggie knew nothing, her presence was unnecessary and undesirable. If, on the other hand, she was unsuccessful, she had determined to go to the station and meet her husband, and acquaint him with the state of things. She drove about for an hour or so, and then changed her mind, and determined to make an effort to see Reggie before he set off.

  She arrived home just as he was starting, and they met in the hall, and when she saw his face she drew a deep breath of satisfaction and relief. He was unmistakably angry.

  “You are just off, are you, dear?” she said quietly. “Give Gertrude my love, and—and be very brave and make an effort, dear boy. It will not be easy. God bless you, my darling?”

  “She wrote to me this morning,” whispered Reggie hoarsely, as he kissed his mother. “I will never speak to her or think of her again. Ah! Mummy, good-bye! You have saved me.”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  After Mrs. Davenport had left her, Eva remained in the dining-room for an hour or more. She had chosen, and the choice was not easy. But it seemed to her as if the struggle came afterwards rather than before. The letter she had written to Reggie rose before her, and her heart cried to her for mercy. But the clear knowledge which she had arrived at, that his chance of happiness grew in direct relation to remoteness from herself, remained unclouded, and at no moment of that hour’s agony would she have reconsidered her decision. That she had so decided was a matter of wonder to her, for it is always a surprise to find that we are better, not worse, than we think; but her investment in unselfishness gave her no quick returns, for at present, as she well knew, Reggie was as miserable as she was. The sacrifice of two victims called down no immediate answer from the blessed gods in the way of a sudden cessation of pain.

  But when that hour was passed, she went upstairs to her husband, to see him about the business he had mentioned. She felt strongly the necessity of being active, of doing something, no matter what, which might possibly take her a little out of herself. Our moral nature has to go to bed when it is hurt, and it is well to leave it there, and not fidget at the bandages to see how it is getting on.

  The business resolved itself into affairs connected with the ironworks at Trelso, and Lord Hayes told her that he was going down that afternoon, and would stop the night there, returning the following day. And Eva, longing for distraction, found none there. Her mother and Percy were in town, and she drove off, and fetched them back to lunch.

  The sight of so well-appointed a house, and the thought that, in a measure, it was part of her environment, as being the mother of its mistress, always put Mrs. Grampound in an excellent humour, at times bordering on a sort of mature playfulness.

  “And how is my little daughter behaving?” she asked Lord Hayes, as soon as they were seated at lunch. “I hope she is doing me credit, and you, too, of
course. I don’t like the way girls behave now. I’m sure they do things we should have got dreadfully abused for when we were young, and now no one takes any notice whatever. Dear Eva, what a lovely piece in the middle of the table. That is new, is it not?”

  “The beauty of it is that it’s very old,” remarked Eva.

  “Really, it looks so bright and fresh. And talking of brightness and freshness, I met Mr. Davenport the other day. He spoke of you a great deal, as if he knew you quite well.”

  “He is a great friend of Eva’s,” said her husband, watching her. “Why hasn’t he come to see you today, Eva?”

  “Chiefly because he left by the mail for Aix this morning,” said Eva. “He asked me to say good-bye to you for him.”

  Lord Hayes had the satisfaction of believing this to be untrue, but that was small compared with the complete failure on his part to ruffle Eva’s bosom with an uneven breath, or raise the slightest tinge of colour to her face.

  “I’m quite in love with him,” she went on slowly, without looking at her husband. “I feel quite desolate without him. Hayes, you must be particularly kind to me all day. Though, of course, you mustn’t hope to compete with Reggie in my affections.”

  Lord Hayes smiled, and took some jelly. Most people know that particular moment experienced at varying distances from Dover pier, when they are not quite sure whether they enjoy the motion or not. Lord Hayes was, metaphorically speaking, being a little tossed about, and if he did not yet think with longing of terra firma, he was not sorry to remember that he would be alone at Trelso that evening.

  “What a beautiful thing it is, is it not,” he said, addressing Mrs. Grampound, “when a wife reposes such confidence in her husband, that she tells him she is in love with someone else. Truly there can be no secrets between such.”

  Mrs. Grampound tittered shrilly. To state the truth, as Eva had done, is often the surest, sometimes the only, way of producing a complete misconception. She failed to notice the acidity in Lord Hayes’s face and voice, and thought the scene quite too charming. But Percy noticed and wondered.

  “What shocking things to say to each other,” cried she. “Eva, you naughty child, how can you? And you deserve I should scold you too,” she said, turning to her son-in-law.

  “Reggie has scorned me and my homage altogether,” continued Eva gravely, speaking chiefly in order to produce a sort of counter-irritant to her own pain, on the same principle as that on which children, suffering from toothache, may be observed to bite their lips. “He has gone off to Aix to see his fiancée. He gave me her photograph—wasn’t that a cruel thing to do?—and his own. Really, it was most shameless. I was never so humiliated before. I think, when Hayes goes away to Trelso, I shall take the train to Aix and sit watching the hotel windows, and serenade him in the hotel garden. It’s quite a new idea for a woman to serenade her lover. Why did you never serenade me, Hayes? I should like to see you serenade on a cold night under a silk umbrella. Can you sing, by the way? You’d have to leave a good deal to the lute, like the man in Browning who serenaded at a villa during a thunderstorm. Your mother wouldn’t approve of serenading, would she? The evening fever sets in about that time, I think, from eleven till two—of course, the damp wouldn’t matter if you had Jaeger boots with eight holes in them.”

  “Eva, you naughty girl,” said her mother again.

  Yes; there was just a little too much motion. Metaphorically speaking, Lord Hayes went below.

  “I’ve got to go to Trelso this afternoon,” he said. “I hear that the men are getting more and more discontented. There is an organised body of Socialists down there, who incite them and refer to me as a brutal tyrant. What a very odd way to spend your life, you know—going about the country calling us names. I can’t think what they imagine they will get by it.”

  “It is rather hard to call you a brutal tyrant,” said Eva with some amusement. “Now, if they had said so of Reggie, or of me, for example—Yes, Percy, you may smoke here, or let’s go up to the top of the porch. There is a tent there, and it is deliciously cool.”

  The two gentlemen stayed behind a moment, and Eva and her mother went on. Lunch made Mrs. Grampound even more effusive than usual.

  “I do so love to think of you here in your beautiful house, darling,” she said to Eva, as they passed up the great marble stairs; “with your husband devoted to you, and all that. A charming little scene at lunch, so playful and delicately touched. But you always were clever, dear. It is such a happiness to me to think of you like this. That yellow collar you have on your liveries is very becoming. How much do you pay your chef? Ah, what a charming little room this tent makes! I suppose you and your husband often sit here.”

  She subsided into a low chair, and looked at Eva affectionately, or, at any rate, with an air of proud proprietorship.

  “I am very rich,” murmured Eva. “I have every thing that money can buy—I have a title—yes, what more can I want?”

  Mentally she was far away. The boat got into Calais about two-thirty. She had looked it out in a Bradshaw that morning. He had just left Calais, going south to join Gertrude. He would be at Aix next morning early. She felt if she could only know exactly what effect her letter had had on him, she would be more content. Her heart ached for the sight of him, ached with the pang of that self-inflicted wound which had sent him away irrevocably, she hoped, or feared—which was it? There was half-an-hour at Calais, she remembered, on her journeys to Algiers; enough to lunch in, to buy a book in, to be rather bored in. There was—ah! The curtain that separated the little tent from the drawing-room was drawn aside, as she had often seen it drawn aside lately, when she said she was not at home to visitors—and Lord Hayes entered.

  “I have come to say good-bye,” he said, “I must be leaving at once for the station. I shall be back tomorrow, Eva, soon after lunch, I expect; we are dining with the Davenports.”

  “Ah, yes, I had forgotten,” said she. “Good-bye! I shall see you tomorrow.”

  “What are you going to do this afternoon?” inquired her mother, after she had kissed her hand to Lord Hayes as he drove off.

  “I am going to Wimbleton House. There is a garden-party. It is a bore, but I promised to go.” Eva paused to see the sudden alacrity with which she knew her mother would receive the news, before she added—“Perhaps you would like to come with me.”

  “I should enjoy it very much,” said her mother. “I am so fond of garden-parties, and they do them so well there.”

  “I didn’t know that you knew the Duchess,” remarked Eva, and let the subject drop.

  She returned home and dined alone, and spent a long evening upstairs in her room. She reviewed again minutely from the beginning, not because she wanted to think of it, but because she could not avoid it, the events of the last weeks. It was as if a sudden light had burst in upon her soul, showing her what was meant by love, and then, just as she comprehended it, the exigencies of its very nature, the compulsion she was under to reveal herself, and that second compulsion which would not allow her to do for Reggie anything but what her sober reason told her was best for him, had left her face to face with this horrible blankness. A spring had broken out which could never, she felt, cease to flow, but she stood there, with mouth gagged, unable to drink of its coolness. In her heart she believed that, even now, if she wrote one word to him—“Come”—in two days he would be with her. But her longing and her firm renunciation seemed indivisible. She could no more have apostatised on her renunciation than she could have compelled herself to be quit of her love. Her nature was of too large and serene a type for her to feel again that one outburst of jealousy when she had torn Gertrude’s photograph in half. At that moment all the worst side of her heart had leapt out—the tigress element; the animal within her had raised that one howl of anguish, but after that it had lain still, cowed to the deeper pain of that in her which was human and divine. At the moment of her renunciation a light had shone on her darkness, and though the darkness comprehended it
not, it wondered and was still; and when in that light she saw and decided what course she must, for all reasons, take, the animal did not venture even to lift its head and growl.

  Reader, are you burning to tell me that all this suffering on the part of Eva and Reggie—even if you allow that such a very proper chastening for the lax self-indulgence with which they slid into the mutual positions they now occupy is a subject fit to be treated of at all in a moral and Christian country, or whether you hold that I might as well describe the infliction of the cat o’ nine tails on a righteously-condemned convict for some well-defined and properly-chastened offence—that this suffering was perfectly well merited; that, had Eva been a woman of even decent moral principles, or had Reggie not been subject to the calviest of calf loves, it would never have happened; that, above all, it was their, particularly her, fault? I plead guilty to all these indictments, or rather I put in no defence for my prisoners, which is the same thing. I admit that Eva was not—according to the best lights, which you, no doubt, are judging her by—a woman of decent moral principles; that it is a tenable view that this infatuation of Reggie’s was only a calf love; but his last, remember, for I have told you that he was a boy no longer; and, above all, I admit that it was their, particularly her, fault.

  Now, with regard to Eva’s morals, you are judging her, I imagine, by your own standards, which, after all, are the only standards by which one man can judge another. No one can judge by other men’s standards, whether they be lower than their own or higher—the result is a loss of moral perspective. You cannot take observations, except by applying your eye straight to the telescope; if you stand above it and squint, you will obtain an incorrect idea of what you wish to see. And in addition to venturing to assume that you judge her by your own standards, I will go further and assume, broadly, what those standards are. I have noticed that when people—as I, for the sake of argument, have made you do—refer to moral principles, they refer to a code which may vary in magnitude and comprehensiveness, but which is based on one principle—the avoidance, even in thought, of certain things which they regard instinctively, almost hysterically, as being impossible, because they are wrong. But the moral principles very seldom go so far as to say they are wrong; they stop short at impossible—they are contrary to its nature—and that is enough. Eva, I am afraid, had no morals at all of this kind. To take an exaggerated instance, I am afraid, if the truth were known, vitally and essentially, she kept her hands from picking or stealing not because it was wrong, but because she did not want the things she might have stolen. It is a very shocking confession, and it is driving a principle home to admit it, but it serves to illustrate under a distorting, or, at any rate, a very high-power lens, the difference between her and you. But—and this, I again assume, is the purport of the whole matter in your mind—it was her own fault. Ah, if I could only tell you how freely I grant you that. And what is there, in Heaven’s name, of all the sufferings we ordinary people undergo, that is not our fault? From the slippers which the labourer’s wife has omitted to put down to warm for her lord, and which give rise to recriminations and perhaps a few silent tears, to the pangs of remorse for some wrong done which we can never undo, what is there of which we are wholly guiltless? The supremely-suffering-babe-unborn-innocent-utterly-milk-and-water heroine of the severely classic romance is not common in this dingy, work-a-day world. It would be presumptuous in me to say she does not exist, but I have never seen her yet. She is a very beautiful and ennobling conception, and she always gets a full reward in the last chapter, where she is joined to her only love and lives happily ever afterwards, and sometimes is seen again in the epilogue, surrounded by a group of golden-haired, clean-limbed children, with their father’s pensive eyes, who utter sentiments which must fill her maternal heart with pride and joy ineffable. But have you never, even in those beautiful epilogues, been faced by a grey, shadowy doubt that life is not quite like this, that even villains have good points, and heroines bad ones; that virtue does not always bring so full a reward, and that vice is not discomfited with that sublime completeness; in a word, that human nature is much more complex, more subtlely compounded than the epilogue would indicate, that a nature capable of a sublime action is also capable of one or of many that do not fall in with your moral principles, and that something is to be said even for the villain? But Eva, I maintain, though not a heroine, and though the bank of ineffable joy had not given her a blank cheque to be filled up at her pleasure, was not a villain. She had done something which no right-minded person would approve in allowing herself to fall in love with Reggie, and in allowing him to fall in love with her; and what is more, she had done something short-sighted. Not knowing the nature of love, she had tried to play with that perplexing emotion, and was finding now that it was not merely playing with her, but ordering her about in a most autocratic manner. She had committed a folly, and in this world we pay more heavily for a folly than a sin. She was bewildered, unstrung, unhappy, by her own fault, no doubt; but if we never pity those on whom justice makes its pitiless claims, whom shall we pity? Are we to class her with the villain, since we cannot class her with the heroine? After all, do not most of us belong to a class which it would be unjust or impossible to class with either the one or the other? There are more gradations between the noon-day sun and the starless night than the epilogues allow for. At any rate, all you Rhadamanthine judges, she was paying for it, and surely that is all you demand. Come a little further with me; your desire for justice, justice to the uttermost farthing, will not be disappointed.