by E. F. Benson
“And does that prevent one’s being a nuisance?” asked Nadine. “Are you sure? Because if you are, you needn’t interrupt Seymour quite so soon. I said half-an-hour, because I thought that would be time enough for him to tell me what a nuisance I was—”
“You’re a heartless little baggage,” observed Jack.
“Not quite,” said Nadine.
“Well, you’re an April day,” said he, seeing the smile break through.
“And that is a doubtful compliment,” said she. “But you are wrong if you think I am not sorry for Seymour. Yet what was I to do, Papa Jack, when I made The Discovery?”
“Well, you’re not a heartless little baggage,” conceded Jack, “but you have taken your heart out of one piece of the baggage, and packed it in another.”
“Oh, la, la,” said Nadine. “We mix our metaphors.”
* * * *
Nadine left with Jack in the motor soon after breakfast next morning. It had been settled that she should not tell Hugh she was going, until she said good-by to him, and when she went to his room next morning to do so, she found him still asleep, and the tall nurse entirely refused to have him awakened.
“Much better for him to sleep than to say good-by,” said this adamantine woman. “When he wakes, he shall be told you have gone, if he asks.”
“Of course he’ll ask,” said Nadine.
She paused a moment.
“Will you let me know if he doesn’t?” she added.
Nurse Bryerley’s grim capable face relaxed into a smile. She did not quite understand the situation, but she was quite content to do her best for her patient according to her lights.
“And shall I say that you’ll be back soon?” she asked.
Nadine had no direct reply to this.
“Ah, do make him get well,” she said.
“That’s what I’m here for. And I will say that you’ll be back soon, shall I, if he wants you?”
“Soon?” said Nadine. “That minute.”
* * * *
Hugh slept long that morning, and Dodo was not told he was awake and ready to receive a morning call till the travelers had been gone a couple of hours. She had spent them in a pleasant atmosphere of conscious virtue, engendered by the feeling that she had sent Jack away when she would much have preferred his stopping here. But as Dodo explained to Edith it took quite a little thing to make her feel good, whereas it took a lot to make her feel wicked.
“A nice morning, for instance,” she said, “or sending my darling Jack away because it’s good for Nadine, or getting a postal-order. Quite little things like that make me feel a perfect saint. Whereas the powers of hell have to do their worst, as the hymn says, to make me feel wicked.”
Edith gave a rather elaborate sigh. She had to sigh carefully because she had a cigarette and a pen in her mouth, while she was scratching out a blot she had made on the score she was revising. So care was needed; otherwise cigarette and pen might have been shot from her mouth. When she spoke her utterance was indistinct and mumbling.
“I suppose you infer that you are more at home in heaven than hell,” she said, “since just a touch makes you feel a saint. I should say it was the other way about. You are so at home in the other place that the most abysmal depths of infamy have to be presented to you before you know they are wicked at all, whereas you hail as divine the most infinitesimal distraction that breaks the monotonous round of vice. Perhaps I am expressing myself too strongly, but I feel strongly. The world is more high-colored to me than to other people.”
“Darling, I never heard such a moderate and well-balanced statement,” said Dodo. “Do go on.”
“I don’t want to. But I thought your optimism about yourself was sickly, and wanted a—a dash of discouragement. But you and Nadine are both the same: if you behave charmingly, you tell us to give the praise to you; if you behave abominably you say, ‘I can’t help it: it was Nature’s fault for making me like that.’ Now I am not like that: whatever I do, I take the responsibility, and say, ‘I am I. Take me or leave me.’ But I have no doubt that Nadine believes it has been too wonderful of her to fall in love with Hugh. And when she jilts Seymour, she says ‘Enquire at Nature’s Workshop; this firm is entirely independent.’ Bah!”
Dodo laughed, but her laugh died rather quickly.
“Ah, don’t be hard, Edith,” she said. “We most of us want encouragement at times, and we have to encourage ourselves by making ourselves out as nice as we can. Otherwise we should look on the mess we make of things as a hopeless job. Perhaps it is hopeless but that is the one thing we mustn’t allow. We are like”—Dodo paused for a simile—“we are like children to whom is given a quantity of lovely little squares of mosaic, and we know, our souls know, that they can be put together into the most beautiful patterns. And we begin fairly well, but then the devil comes along, and jogs our elbow, and smashes it all up. Probably it is our own stupidity, but it is more encouraging to say it is the devil or nature, something not ourselves. Good heavens, my elbow has jogged often enough! And when the pattern gets on well, we encourage ourselves by saying, ‘This is clever and good and wise Me doing it now!’ And then perhaps something very big and solemn comes our way, and we bow our heads, and know it isn’t ourselves at all.”
Edith had finished erasing her blot, and was gathering her sheets together. She tapped them dramatically with an inky forefinger.
“This is big and solemn,” she said. “But it’s Me. The artist’s inspiration never comes from outside: it is always from within. I’m going to send it to have the band parts copied today.”
At the moment the message came that Hugh received, and Dodo got up. He had received Edith one morning, but the effect was that he had eaten no lunch and had dozed uneasily all afternoon. Edith had been content with the explanation that her vitality was too strong for him, and, while ready to give him another dose of it, did not press the matter; anyhow, she had other business on hand.
He lay propped up in bed, with a wad of pillows at his back. He looked far more alert and present than he had yet done. Hitherto, he had been slow to grasp the meaning of what was said to him, and he hardly ever volunteered a statement or question, but this morning he smiled and spoke with quite unusual quickness.
“Morning, Aunt Dodo,” he said. “I’m awfully brisk today.”
Nurse Bryerley put in a warning word.
“Don’t be too brisk,” she said. “Please don’t let him be too brisk,” she added, looking at Dodo.
“Hughie, dear, you do look better,” she said; “but we’ll all be quite calm, and self-contained like flats.”
Hugh frowned for a moment; then his face cleared again.
“I see,” he said. “Bright, aren’t I? Aunt Dodo, I have certainly woke up this morning. You look real, do you know; before I was never quite certain about you. You looked as if you might be a good forgery, but spurious. Have a cigarette, and why shouldn’t I?”
“Wiser not,” said Nurse Bryerley laconically.
Hugh’s briskness did not seem to be entirely good-natured.
“How on earth could a cigarette hurt me?” he said. “Perhaps it would be wiser for Lady Chesterford not to smoke either. Aunt Dodo, you mustn’t smoke. Wiser not.”
Nurse Bryerley smiled with secret content.
“That’s right, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I like to see my patients irritable. It always shows they are getting better.”
“I should have thought you might have seen that without annoying me,” said Hugh.
“Well, well, I don’t mind your having one cigarette to keep Lady Chesterford company,” said the nurse. “But you’ll be disappointed.”
Dodo took out her case as Nurse Bryerley left the room. “Here you are, Hughie,” she said.
Hugh lit one, and blew a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.
“Are they quite fresh, Aunt Dodo?” he said.
“Yes, dear, quite. Doesn’t it taste right?”
“Yes, delicious,” said Hugh
, absolutely determined not to find it disappointing. “I say, what a sunny morning!”
“Is it too much in your eyes?”
“It is rather. Will you ask Nurse Bryerley to pull the blind down? Why should you?”
“Chiefly, dear, because it isn’t any trouble.”
Dodo pulled down the blind too far on the first attempt to be pleasing, not far enough on the second. Hugh felt she was very clumsy.
“Isn’t Nadine coming to see me this morning?” he asked. “But I daresay she is tired of sitting with me every day.”
Dodo came back to her chair by the bed again.
“She went off with Jack to Winston this morning,” she said. “Just for a change. She was very much tired and overdone. You’ve been a fearful anxiety to her, you dear bad boy.”
Hugh put his cigarette down and shut his mouth, as if firmly determined never to speak again.
“She came in to say good-by to you,” she said, “but you were asleep and they didn’t want to wake you.”
There was still dead silence on Hugh’s part.
“It was only settled she should go yesterday,” she continued, “and she had to be persuaded. But Jack wanted one of us, and, as I say, she was very much overdone. Now I’m not the least overdone. So I stopped. But I wish she could have seen how much more yourself you were when you woke today.”
At length Hugh spoke.
“What is the use of telling me that sort of tale?” he said. “She is going to be married to Seymour in a few days. She has gone away for that. I suppose in some cold-blooded way she thought it better to sneak off without telling me. No doubt it was very tactful of her.”
Dodo turned round towards him.
“No, Hughie, you are quite wrong,” she said. “Nadine is not going to marry Seymour at all.”
Hugh lifted his right hand, and examined it cursorily. A long cut, now quite healed, ran up the length of his forefinger.
“I see,” he said. “She said she would marry Seymour in order to get rid of me, and now that I have been got rid of in other ways, she has no further use for him. Isn’t that it?”
His face had become quite white, and the hand with the healed wound trembled so violently that the bed shook.
“No, that is not it,” said Dodo quietly. “And don’t be so nervous and fidgety, my dear.”
Suddenly the trembling ceased.
“Aunt Dodo, if it is not that, what is it?” he asked, in a voice that would have melted Rhadamanthus.
She turned a shining face on him, and laid her hand on his.
“Oh, Hughie, lie still and get well,” she said. “And then ask Nadine herself. She will come back when you want her. She told Nurse Bryerley to tell you so, if you asked.”
Hugh moved across his other hand, so that Dodo’s lay between his.
“I must ask you one more thing,” he said. “Is it because of me in any way that she chucked Seymour? I entreat you to say ‘no’ if it is ‘no.’”
“I can’t say ‘no,’” said Dodo.
Hugh drew one long sobbing breath.
“It’s mere pity then,” he said. “Nadine always liked me, and she was always impulsive like that. I daresay she won’t marry him till I’m better, if I am ever better. She will wait till I am strong enough to enjoy it thoroughly.”
Dodo interrupted him.
“Hughie, don’t say bitter and untrue things like that,” she said. “And don’t feel them. She is not going to marry Seymour, either now or afterwards.”
Once again Hugh was silent, and after an interval Dodo spoke, divining exactly what was in his irritable convalescent mind.
“I have never deceived you before, Hughie,” she said, “and you have no right to distrust me now. I am telling you the truth. I also tell you the truth when I say you must get bitter thoughts out of your mind. Ah, my dear, it is not always easy. There’s a beast within each of us.”
“There’s a beast within me,” said Hugh.
“And there’s a dear brave fellow whom I am so proud of,” said Dodo.
Hugh’s lip quivered, but there was a quality in his silence as different from that which had gone before, as there was between his callings for Nadine on the night when she fought death for him.
“And now that’s enough,” said Dodo. “Shall I read to you, Hughie, or shall I leave you for the present?”
He held her hand a moment longer.
“I think I will lie still and—and think,” he said.
“Good luck to your fishing, dear,” said she, rising.
“Good luck to your fishing?” he said. “It’s on a picture. Small boy fishing, kneeling in the waves.”
Dodo beat a strategic retreat.
“Is it?” she said.
But it seemed to Hugh that her voice lacked the blank enquiry tone of ignorance.
Hugh settled himself a little lower down on his backing of pillows, after Dodo had left him, and tried to arrange his mind, so that the topics that concerned it stood consecutively. But Dodo’s last remark, which certainly should have stood last also in his reflections, kept on shouldering itself forward. She had wished him “good luck to his fishing,” and he could not bring himself to believe that, consciously or unconsciously, there was not in her mind a certain picture, of a little winged boy, kneeling in the waves, who dropped a red line into the unquiet sea. He could not, and did not try to remember the painter, but certainly the picture had been at some exhibition which he and Nadine had attended together. A little winged boy.… The title was printed after the number in the catalogue.
Nadine was not to marry Seymour now or afterwards.… There came a black speck again over his thoughts. He himself had been got rid of by this crippling accident, and now she had expunged Seymour also. ‘And though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love.’ The lines came into his mind without any searching for them; for the moment he could not remember where he had heard them. And then memory began to awake.
Hitherto, he had not been able to recall anything of the day or two that preceded his catastrophe. A few of the immediate events before it he had never forgotten. He remembered Nadine calling out, “No Hugh, not you,” he remembered her cry of “Well done”; he remembered that he had toppled in on that line of toppling waters with a small boy on his back. But now a fresh line of memory had been awakened: some connection in his brain had been restored, and he remembered their quarrel and reconciliation on the day the gale began; how she had said, “Oh, Hughie, if only I loved you!” Soon after came the portentous advent of the wind, with the blotting out of the sun, and the transformation of the summer sea.
He heard with unspeakable irritation the entry of Nurse Bryerley. That seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, for he felt as if he had been alone with Nadine, and now this assiduous grenadier broke in upon them with a hundred fidgety offices to perform. She restored to him a fallen pillow, she closed a window through which a breeze was blowing rather freely, she brought him a cup of chicken-broth. It seemed an eternity before she asked him if he was comfortable, and made her long-delayed exit. Even then she reminded him that the doctor was due in half-an-hour.
But for half-an-hour he would be alone now, and for the first time since his accident he found that he wanted to think. Hitherto his mind had sat vacant, like an idle passenger who sees without observation or interest the transit of the country. But Dodo’s visit this morning and her communications to him had made life appear a thing that once more concerned him; till now it was but a manœuver taking place round him, but outside him. Now the warmth of it reached him again, and began to circulate through him. And what she had told him was being blown out, as it were, in his brain, even as a lather of soapsuds is blown out into an iridescent bubble, on which gleam all the hues of sunset and moonrise and rainbow. The rainbow was not one of the vague dreams in which, lately, his mind had moved; it was a real thing, not receding but coming nearer to him, blown towards him by some steady breeze, not idly vagrant in the effortless air. Should it break
on his heart, not into nothingness, but into the one white light out of which the sum of all lights and colors is made?
He could not doubt that it was this which Dodo meant. Nadine had thrown over Seymour and that concerned him. And then swift as the coming of the storm which they had seen together, came the thought, clear and precise as the rows of thunder-clouds, that for all he knew a barrier forever impenetrable lay between them. For he could never offer to her a cripple; the same pride that had refused to let him take an intimate place beside her after she, by her acceptance of Seymour, had definitely rejected him, forbade him, without possibility of discussion, to let her tie herself to him, unless he could stand sound and whole beside her. He must be competent in brain and bone and body to be Nadine’s husband. And for that as yet he had no guarantee.
Since his accident he had not up till now cared to know precisely what his injuries were, nor whether he could ever completely recover from them. The concussion of the brain had quenched all curiosity, and interest not only in things external to him, but in himself, and he had received the assurance that he was going on very well with the unconcern that we feel for remote events. But now his thoughts flew back from Nadine and clustered round himself. He felt that he must know his chances, the best or the worst…and yet he dreaded to know, for he could live for a little in a paradise by imagining that he would get completely well, instead of in a shattered ruin which the knowledge of the worst would strew round him.
But this morning the energy of life which for those two weeks had lain dormant in him, began to stir again. He wanted. It seemed to him but a few moments since his nurse left him that Dr. Cardew came in. He saw the flushed face and brightened eyes of his patient, and after an enquiry or two took out the thermometer which he had not used for days, and tested Hugh’s temperature. He put it back again in its nickel case with a smile.
“Well, it’s not any return of fever, anyhow,” he said. “Do you feel different in any way this morning?”
“Yes. I want to get well.”
“Highly commendable,” said Dr. Cardew.
Hugh fingered the bed-clothes in sudden agitation.