The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  It was not long before Lady Ashbridge’s nurse appeared, to take her upstairs to rest. At that her patient became suddenly and unaccountably agitated: all the happy content of the day was wiped off her mind. She clung to Michael.

  “No, no, Michael,” she said, “they mustn’t take me away. I know they are going to take me away from you altogether. You mustn’t leave me.”

  Nurse Baker came towards her.

  “Now, my lady, you mustn’t behave like that,” she said. “You know you are only going upstairs to rest as usual before dinner. You will see Lord Comber again then.”

  She shrank from her, shielding herself behind Michael’s shoulder.

  “No, Michael, no!” she repeated. “I’m going to be taken away from you. And look, Miss—ah, my dear, I have forgotten your name—look, she has got no hat on. She was going to stop with me a long time. Michael, must I go?”

  Michael saw the nurse looking at her, watching her with that quiet eye of the trained attendant.

  Then she spoke to Michael.

  “Well, if Lord Comber will just step outside with me,” she said, “we’ll see if we can arrange for you to stop a little longer.”

  “And you’ll come back, Michael,” said she.

  Michael saw that the nurse wanted to say something to him, and with infinite gentleness disentangled the clinging of Lady Ashbridge’s hand.

  “Why, of course I will,” he said. “And won’t you give Miss Falbe another cup of tea?”

  Lady Ashbridge hesitated a moment.

  “Yes, I’ll do that,” she said. “And by the time I’ve done that you will be back again, won’t you?”

  Michael followed the nurse from the room, who closed the door without shutting it.

  “There’s something I don’t like about her this evening,” she said. “All day I have been rather anxious. She must be watched very carefully. Now I want you to get her to come upstairs, and I’ll try to make her go to bed.”

  Michael felt his mouth go suddenly dry.

  “What do you expect?” he said.

  “I don’t expect anything, but we must be prepared. A change comes very quickly.”

  Michael nodded, and they went back together.

  “Now, mother darling,” he said, “up you go with Nurse Baker. You’ve been out all day, and you must have a good rest before dinner. Shall I come up and see you soon?”

  A curious, sly look came into Lady Ashbridge’s face.

  “Yes, but where am I going to?” she said. “How do I know Nurse Baker will take me to my own room?”

  “Because I promise you she will,” said Michael.

  That instantly reassured her. Mood after mood, as Michael saw, were passing like shadows over her mind.

  “Ah, that’s enough!” she said. “Good-bye, Miss—there! The name’s gone again! But won’t you sit here and have a talk to Michael, and let him show you over the house to see if you like it against the time—Oh, Michael said I mustn’t worry you about that. And won’t you stop and have dinner with us, and afterwards we can sing.”

  Michael put his arm around her.

  “We’ll talk about that while you’re resting,” he said. “Don’t keep Nurse Baker waiting any longer, mother.”

  She nodded and smiled.

  “No, no; mustn’t keep anybody waiting,” she said. “Your father taught me to be punctual.”

  When they had left the room together, Sylvia turned to Michael.

  “Michael, my dear,” she said, “I think you are—well, I think you are Michael.”

  She saw that at the moment he was not thinking of her at all, and her heart honoured him for that.

  “I’m anxious about my mother tonight,” he said. “She has been so—I suppose you must call it—well all day, but the nurse isn’t easy about her.”

  Suddenly all his fears and his fatigue and his trouble looked out of his eyes.

  “I’m frightened,” he said, “and it’s so unutterably feeble of me. And I’m tired: you don’t know how tired, and try as I may I feel that all the time it is no use. My mother is slipping, slipping away.”

  “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 a
nd 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 little 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.

  MICHAEL (Part 3)

  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 chan
ged 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!”