The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “That will be ripping,” said Nadine, assuming a sleepy voice.

  There was silence for a little. Then once again, but in his own voice, Hugh spoke her name. This time she did not answer, and she felt his hand move till it rested against her plaited hair.

  Then in the silence Nadine became conscious of another noise regular and slow as the faint hoarse thunder of the sea, the sound of quiet breathing. After a while the doctor came round the head of the bed.

  “We can manage to wrap you up, and make you fairly comfortable,” he whispered. “I think he has a better chance of sleeping if you stop there.”

  The light and radiance in Nadine’s eyes were a miracle of beauty, like some enchanted dawn rising over a virgin and unknown land. She smiled her unmistakable answer, but did not speak, and presently Dodo returned with pillows and blankets, which she spread over her and folded round her.

  “The nurse will be in the next room,” said the doctor; “call her if anything is wanted.”

  Dodo and the doctor went back to their rooms, and Nadine was left alone with Hugh. That night was the birthnight and the bridal-night of her soul: there was it born, and through the long hours of the winter night it watched beside its lover and its beloved, in that stillness of surrender to and absorption in another, that lies beyond and above the unrest of passion amid the snows and sunshine of the uttermost regions to which the human spirit can aspire. She knew nothing of the passing of the hours, nor for a long time did any thought or desire of sleep come near her eyelids, but the dim room became to her the golden island of which once in uncomprehending mockery she had spoken to Hugh. She knew it to be golden now, and so far from being unreal, there was nothing in her experience so real as it.

  She could just turn her head without disturbing Hugh’s hand that lay on her plaited hair, and from time to time she looked round at him. His face still wore the sunken pallor of exhaustion, but as his sleep, so still and even-breathing, began to restore the low-ebb of his vital force, it seemed to Nadine that the darkness of the valley of the shadow, to the entrance of which he had been so near, cleared off his face as eclipse passes from the moon. How near he had been, she guessed, but it seemed to her that for the present his face was set the other way. She knew, too, that it was she who had had the power to make him look life-wards again, and the knowledge filled her with a sort of abasing pride. He had answered to her voice when he was past all other voices, and had come back in obedience to it.

  She did not and she could not yet be troubled with the thought of anything else besides the fact that Hugh lived. As far as was known yet, he might never recover his activity of movement again, and years of crippled life were all that lay in front of him; but in the passing away of the immediate imminent fear, she could not weigh or even consider what that would mean. Similarly the thought of Seymour lay for the present outside the focus of her mind: everything but the fact that Hugh lived was blurred and had wavering outlines. As the hours went on the oblongs of moonshine on the floor moved across the room, narrowing as they went. Then the moon sank and the velvet of the cloudless sky grew darker, and the stars more luminous. One great planet, tremulous and twinkling, made a glory beside which all the lesser lights paled into insignificance. No wind stirred in the great halls of the night, the moans and yells of its unquiet soul were still, and the boom of the surf grew ever less sonorous, like the thunder of a retreating storm. Occasionally the night-nurse appeared at the doorway of the room adjoining, where she sat, and as often Nadine looked up at her smiling. Once, very softly, she came round the head of the bed, and looked at Hugh, then bent down towards the girl.

  “Won’t you get some sleep?” she said, and Nadine made a little gesture of raised eyebrows and parted hands that was characteristic of her.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Perhaps not. I don’t want to.”

  Then her solitary night vigil began again, and it seemed to her that she would not have bartered a minute of it for the best hour that her life had known before. The utter peace and happiness of it grew as the night went on, for still close to her head there came the regular uninterrupted breathing, and the weight, just the weight of a hand absolutely relaxed, lay on her hair. Not the faintest stir of movement other than those regular respirations came from the bed, and all the laughter and joy of which her days had been full was as the light of the remotest of stars compared to the glorious planet that sang in the windless sky, when weighed against the joy that that quiet breathing gave her. She did not color her consciousness with hope, she did not illuminate it by prayer; there was no room in her mind for anything except the knowledge that Hugh slept and lived.

  It was now near the dawning of the winter day; the stars were paling in the sky, and the sky grew ensaffroned with the indescribable hue that heralds day. Footfalls, muffled and remote, began to stir in the house, and far away there came the sound of crowing cocks, faint but exultant, hailing the dawn. About that time, Nadine looked round once more at Hugh, and saw in the pallid light of morning that the change she had noticed before was more distinct. There had come back to his face something of the firm softness of youth, there had been withdrawn from it the droop and hardness of exhaustion. And turning again, she gave one sigh and fell fast asleep.

  Lover and beloved they lay there sleeping, while the dawn brightened in the sky, she leaning against the bed where he was stretched, he with his hand on her hair. And strangely, the moment that she slept, their positions seemed to be reversed, and Hugh in his sleep appeared unconsciously to keep watch over and guard her, though all night she had been awake for him. Once her head slipped an inch or two, so that his hand no longer lay on her hair, but it seemed as if that movement reached down to him fathom-deep in his slumber and immediately afterwards his hand, which had lain so motionless and inert all night, moved, as if to a magnet, after that bright hair, seeking and finding it again. And dawn brightened into day, and the sun leaped up from his lair in the East, and still Nadine slept, and Hugh slept. It was as if until then the balance of vitality had kept the girl awake to pour into him of her superabundance: now she was drained, and sleep with the level stroke of his soft hand across the furrows of trouble and the jagged edges of injury and exhaustion comforted both alike.

  It had been arranged after these events of storm that the party should disperse, and Dodo went to early breakfast downstairs with her departing guests, who were leaving soon after. But first she went into the nurse’s room, next door to where Hugh lay, to make enquiries, and was taken by her to look into the sick-room. With daylight their sleep seemed only to have deepened: it was like the slumber of lovers who have been long awake in passion of mutual surrender, and at the end have fallen asleep like children, with mere effacement of consciousness. Nadine’s head was a little bowed forward, and her breath came not more evenly than his. It was the sleep of childlike content that bound them both, and bound them together.

  Dodo looked long, and then with redoubled precaution moved softly into the nurse’s room again, with mouth quivering between smiles and tears.

  “My dear, I never saw anything so perfectly sweet,” she said. “Do let them have their sleep out, nurse. And Nadine has slept in Hugh’s room all night. What ducks! Please God it shall so often happen again!”

  Nurse Bryerley was not unsympathetic, but she felt that explanations were needed.

  “I understood the young lady was engaged to some one else,” she said.

  Dodo smiled.

  “But until now no one has quite understood the young lady herself,” she said. “Least of all, has she understood herself. I think she will find that she is less mysterious now.”

  “Mr. Graves will have to take some nourishment soon,” said Nurse Bryerley.

  Dodo considered.

  “Then could you not give him his nourishment very cautiously, so that he will go to sleep again afterwards?” she asked. “I should like them to sleep all day like that. But then, you see, nurse, I am a very odd woman. But don’t
disturb them till you must. I think their souls are getting to know each other. That may not be scientific nursing, but I think it is sound nursing. It’s too bad we can’t eternalize such moments of perfect equilibrium.”

  “Certainly the young lady was awake till nearly dawn,” said Nurse Bryerley. “It wouldn’t hurt her to have a good rest.”

  Dodo beamed.

  “Oh, leave them as long as possible,” she said. “You have no idea how it warms my heart. There will be trouble enough when they awake.”

  Seymour was among those who were going by the early train, and when Dodo came down he had finished breakfast. He got up just as she entered.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  Dodo’s warm approbation went out to him.

  “It was nice of you to ask that first, dear Seymour,” she said. “He is asleep: he has slept all night.”

  Seymour lit a cigarette.

  “I asked that first,” he said, “because it was a mixture of politeness and duty to do so. I suppose you understand.”

  Dodo took the young man by the arm.

  “Come out and talk to me in the hall,” she said. “Bring me a cup of tea.”

  The morning sunshine flooded the window-seat by the door, and Dodo sat down there for one moment’s thought before he joined her. But she found that no thought was necessary. She had absolutely made up her mind as to her own view of the situation, and with all the regrets in the world for him, she was prepared to support it. In a minute Seymour joined her.

  “Nadine came down to the beach just before Hugh went in yesterday morning,” he said, “and she called out—called?—shouted out, ‘Not you, Hughie: Seymour, Berts, anybody, but not you!’ There was no need for me to think what that meant.”

  Dodo looked at him straight.

  “No, my dear, there was no need,” she said.

  “Then I have been a—a farcical interlude,” said he, not very kindly. “You managed that farcical interlude, you know. You licensed it, so to speak, like the censor of plays.”

  “Yes, I licensed it, you are quite right. But, my dear, I didn’t license it as a farce; there you wrong me. I licensed it as what I hoped would be a very pleasant play. You must be just, Seymour: you didn’t love her then, nor she you. You were good friends, and there was no shadow of a reason to suppose that you would not pass very happy times together. The great love, the real thing, is not given to everybody. But when it comes, we must bow to it.… It is royal.”

  All his flippancy and quickness of wit had gone from him. Next conversation remained only because it was a habit.

  “And I am royal,” he said. “I love Nadine like that.”

  “Then you know that when that regality comes,” she said quickly, “it comes without control. It is the same with Nadine; it is by no wish of hers that it came.”

  “I must know that from Nadine,” he said. “I can’t take your word for it, or anybody’s except hers. She made a promise to me.”

  “She cannot keep it,” said Dodo. “It is an impossibility for her. She made it under different conditions, and you put your hand to it under the same. And Nadine said you understood, and behaved so delightfully yesterday. All honor to you, since behind your behavior there was that knowledge, that royalty.”

  “I had to. But don’t think I abdicated. But she was in terrible distress, and really, Aunt Dodo, the rest of your guests were quite idiotic. Berts looked like a frog; he had the meaningless pathos of a frog on his silly face—”

  “Nadine said he looked like a funeral with plumes,” Dodo permitted herself to interpolate.

  “More like a frog. Edith kept pouring out glasses of port to take to Nadine, but I think she usually forgot and drank them herself. It was a lunatic asylum. But Nadine felt.”

  “Ah, my dear,” said Dodo, with a movement of her hand on to his.

  Seymour quietly disengaged his own.

  “Very gratifying,” he said, “but as I said, I take nobody’s word for it, except Nadine’s. She has got to tell me herself. Where is she? I have to go in five minutes, but to see her will still leave me four to spare.”

  Dodo got up.

  “You shall see her,” she said. “But come quietly, because she is asleep.”

  “If she is only to talk to me in her sleep—” began he.

  “Come quietly,” said Dodo.

  But all her pity was stirred, and as they went along the passage to Hugh’s room, she slipped her arm into his. She knew that her coup was slightly theatrical, but there seemed no better way of showing him. It might fail: he might still desire explanations, but it was worth trying.

  “And remember I am sorry,” she said, “and be sure that Nadine will be sorry.”

  “Riddles,” said Seymour.

  “Yes, my dear, riddles if you will,” said she. “But you may guess the answer.”

  Dodo quietly turned the handle of the door into the nurse’s room, and entered with her arm still in his. She made a sign of silence, and took Seymour straight through into the sick-room. All was as she had left it a quarter-of-an-hour ago; Nadine still slept and Hugh, in that same attitude of security and love. Her head was drooped; she slept as only children and lovers sleep. But Dodo with all her intuition did not see as much as Seymour, who loved her, saw. The truth of it was branded into his brain, whereas it only shone in hers. She saw the situation: he felt it.

  Then with a signal of pressure on his arm, she led him out again.

  “She has been there all night,” she said. “She only fell asleep at dawn.”

  They were in the passage again before Seymour spoke.

  “There is no need for me to awake her or talk to her,” he said. “You were quite right. And I congratulate you on your ensemble. I should have guessed that it required most careful rehearsal. And I should have been wrong. And now, for God’s sake, don’t be kind and tender—”

  He took his arm away from hers, feeling for her then more resentment than he might feel against the footman who conveyed cold soup to him. He did not want the footman’s sympathy, nor did he want Dodo’s.

  “And spare me your optimism,” he said. “If you tell me it is all for the best, I shall scream. It isn’t for the best, as far as I am concerned. It is damned bad. I was a Thing, and Nadine made a man of me. Now she is tired of her handiwork, and says that I shall be a Thing again. And don’t tell me I shall get over it. The fact that I know I shall, makes your information, which was on the tip of your tongue, wanton and superfluous. But if you think I shall love Hugh, because he loves Nadine, you are utterly astray. I am not a child in a Sunday school, letting the teacher smack both sides of my face. I hate Hugh, and I am not the least touched by the disgusting spectacle you have taken me on tiptoe to see. They looked like two amorous monkeys in the monkey-house.”

  Seymour suddenly paused and gasped.

  “They didn’t,” he said. “At any rate Nadine looked as I have often pictured her looking. The difference is that it was myself, not Hugh, beside whom I imagined her falling asleep. That makes a lot of difference if you happen to be the person concerned. And now I hope the motor is ready to take me away, and many thanks for an absolutely damnable visit. Don’t look pained. It doesn’t hurt you as much as it hurts me. There is a real cliché to finish with.”

  Dodo’s coup had been sufficiently theatrical to satisfy her, but she had not reckoned with the possible savageness that it might arouse. Seymour’s temper, as well as his love, was awake, and she had not thought of the two as being at home simultaneously, but had imagined they played Box-and-Cox with each other in the minds of men. Here Box and Cox met, and they were hand-in-hand. He was convinced and angry: she had imagined he would be convinced and pathetic. With that combination she had felt herself perfectly competent to deal. But his temper roused hers.

  “You are at least interesting,” she said briskly, “and I have enjoyed what you call your damnable visit as much as you. You seem to have behaved decently yesterday, but no doubt that was Nadine’s mist
ake.”

  “Not at all: it was mine,” he said.

  “Which you now recognize,” said she. “I am afraid you must be off, if you want to catch your train. Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” said he.

  He turned from her at the top of the stairs, and went down a half-dozen of them. Then suddenly he turned back again.

  “Don’t you see I’m in hell?” he said.

  Dodo entirely melted at that, and ran down the stairs to him.

  “Oh, Seymour, my dear,” she said. “A woman’s pity can’t hurt you. Do accept it.”

  She drew that handsome tragical face towards her, and kissed him.

  “Do you mind my kissing you?” she said. “There’s my heart behind it. There is, indeed.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Dodo,” he said. “And—and you might tell Nadine I saw her like that. I am not so very stupid. I understand: good-by.”

  “And Hugh?” she asked, quite unwisely, but in that optimistic spirit that he had deprecated.

  “Don’t strain magnanimity,” he said. “It’s quality is not strained. Say good-by to Nadine for me. Say I saw her asleep, and didn’t disturb her. I never thought much of her intelligence, but she may understand that. She will have to tell me what she means to do. That I require. At present our wedding-day is fixed.”

  Seymour broke off suddenly and ran downstairs without looking back.

  Dodo was quite sincerely very sorry for him, but almost the moment he had gone she ceased to think about him altogether, for there were so many soul-absorbing topics to occupy her, and forgetting she had had no breakfast, she went to Edith’s room (Edith alone had not the slightest intention of going away) to discuss them. Her optimism was luckily quite incurable: she could not look on the darker aspect of affairs for more than a minute or two. She found Edith breakfasting in bed, with a large fur cape flung over her shoulders. Her breakfast had been placed on a table beside her, but for greater convenience she had disposed the plates round her, on her counterpane. There were also disposed there sheets of music-paper, a pen and ink-bottle, and a box of cigarettes. The window was wide open, and as Dodo entered the draught caused the music paper to flutter, and Edith laid hasty restraining hands on it, and screamed with her mouth full.