Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Yes, we hope that Jack and Kit will both come down here in ten days or so,” said Toby.

  “And Lord Comber, too,” went on Mrs. Murchison guilelessly. “It was that same day he had a fall, and bruised himself very badly. Misfortunes never come singly. Did you not hear? He fell on his head, and I should think it was lucky he did not get percussion of the brain.”

  Toby did not glance at his wife.

  “Very lucky,” he said.

  “Was it not? Then I spent Wednesday at Oxford, which I was determined to see before I left England. Most beautiful and interesting it is. I lunched with the Master of Magdalen College, whom I met in London several times, and saw the statue they put up on the place where Shelley died.”

  “I thought he was drowned,” said Lily.

  “Very likely, dear,” said Mrs. Murchison; “and now I come to think of it, the place is near the river, so I expect they put it up as near as they could. You couldn’t wish to see them put a recumbent statue, a very recumbent statue indeed, so it is, in ten feet of water, dear,” she observed, with great justice.

  Mrs. Murchison sipped her tea in a very ecstasy of content. It was barely a year since she had first seen Toby, and marked him down as the ideal husband for Lily; and there they were all three of them, drinking tea, as she said to herself, in the stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand! Her siege of London had been rapid and brilliantly successful. The fortifications had fallen sudden and flat, like the walls of Jericho; and she made no more of dining at the Criterion with that marvellous Lady Tarling than of washing her hands or going to America.

  “Yes, the Master of Magdalen College was most kind,” continued Mrs. Murchison, “and said he remembered Toby well. Dear me, what a lot I shall have to tell your father, Lily! And after lunch — really, a most excellent lunch, I assure you, with quails in asps — we went down to the Ibis.”

  “To the where?” asked Lily.

  “To the river,” said Mrs. Murchison, suspecting a difficulty, “and saw where the college boats rowed their races — torpedoes, I think the Master called them, and I remember wondering why. His own torpedo won the last races.”

  Here Toby choked violently over his tea, and left the room with a rapid uneven step.

  “Perhaps it’s not torpedoes, then,” went on his mother-in-law, supposing that he would have corrected her if he had been able to speak; “but it’s something very like. Dear me, what a terrible noise poor Toby makes! Had we better go and pat him on the back? Then yesterday I went to the ‘Messiah’ at the Albert Hall, which made me cry.”

  Mrs. Murchison looked welcomingly at Toby, who here reappeared again, rather red and feeble.

  “Dear Toby,” she said, “it’s just lovely to think of you and Lily so settled and titled and happy; and when I’m on the ocean, I shall often go to my state-room, and count the days till I come back. I must be in America at least a fortnight, if not ten days; and I shall try and persuade Mr. Murchison to come across with me when I return. I’m very lucky about ships: I go out in the Lucania, and come back in the Campagna. And is there anyone else coming down here before I go on Wednesday, or shall we have a nice little no-place-like-home all by ourselves?”

  “Oh, we are going to be simply domestic,” said Lily, rising, “and we shan’t have a soul beside ourselves. You know both Toby and I are naturally most domestic animals. We neither of us have any passion for the world. We like being out of doors, and playing the fool, and having high-tea — don’t we, Toby?”

  “I have no passion for high-tea,” remarked Toby.

  “Oh yes, you have. Don’t be stupid! I don’t mean literal high-tea, but figurative high-tea.”

  “The less literalness there is about high-tea, the better I like it,” said Toby.

  Lily passed behind his chair and pulled his wiry hair gently.

  “Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D’Eyncourt Massingbird, M.P., is not such a fool as a person might suppose,” she remarked. “At times he shows glimmerings of sense. His love for figurative high-teas as opposed to figurative high-dinners is an instance. Don’t blush, Toby. You’ve little else to be proud of.”

  “I’ve got you to be proud of,” remarked Toby, bending back his head to look at her.

  Mrs. Murchison rustled appreciatively. That was the sort of thing which English people could say naturally without gush or affectation. A Frenchman would have bowed, put his heels together, and kissed his wife’s hand. An Italian would have struck the region of his heart. An American would have expressed it in four-syllable periphrasis. But Toby did none of these things. He said it quite simply, lit a cigarette, and growled:

  “Leggo my hair, Lily!”

  Lily “leggoed” his hair.

  “He is trying to blow rings,” she explained, “but he can only blow ribands and streamers. Also, he looks like an owl when he tries. Rings on his fingers and bells on his toes,” she added with immense thoughtfulness. “Toby, I’ll buy you a peal of bells if you will promise to wear them on your toes.”

  Toby got up from his chair.

  “If anyone has anything else of a peculiarly personal nature to say about me, now is their time,” he remarked; “otherwise, we’ll go out. Dear me! the last time I was here we got snowed up at Pangbourne, and slept in the Elephant Inn, and I remember I dreamed about boiled rabbit. I seldom dream, but I remember it when I do.”

  Lily sighed.

  “Yes, and poor Kit was waiting for us all here. She was quite alone, mother, and had an awful crise des nerves over it.”

  “I should have thought she was the last person in the world to be nervous,” said Mrs. Murchison.

  “Oh, crise des nerves is not nervousness,” said Lily; “it is being strung up, and run down, and excited.”

  “My mother,” remarked Mrs. Murchison, “was of a very nervous temperament. I have seen her on the coldest days suddenly empty a carafe of water over the fire, for fear of the house catching. And evenings she would sometimes blow out the candle for the same reason.”

  Toby giggled explosively.

  “And the cruel part was,” continued Mrs. Murchison, “that throughout life she was afraid of the dark, in which the blowing out of the candles naturally left her. So, between her dread of a conflagration and her terror of the dark, it was out of the fireplace into the fire.”

  “Frying-pan, mother,” said Lily.

  “Maybe, dear; I thought it was fireplace. But it’s six of one and half a dozen of another. Poor Mommer! she had a very nervous and excitable temperament, with sudden bursts of anger. At such times she would take out her false teeth — she suffered from early decay — and dash them to the ground, though it meant slops till they got repaired. Most excitable she was.”

  “Very trying,” said Toby rather tremulously.

  “No, we didn’t find her trying, Toby,” said this excellent lady. “We were very fond of her. Poor dear Mommer!”

  She sighed heavily, with memory-dim eyes, and Toby’s laughter died in his mouth. Mrs. Murchison got up.

  “Well, I shall put on my hat,” she said, “and come out with you both. I brought an evening paper down with me, but there is nothing in it, except that there has been a terrible tomato in the West Indies, destroying five villages — tornado, I should say — and great loss of life.”

  She went out of the room to fetch her hat, and Lily and Toby were left alone. Toby looked furtively up, wondering what he should meet in Lily’s eye. Her face, like his, was struggling for gravity, and both shook with hardly-suppressed laughter. Neither could speak, and they turned feebly away from each other, Toby leaning with trembling shoulder on the mantelpiece, and Lily biting her lip as she looked helplessly out over lawn and river. Now and then there would come from one or other a sobbing breath, and neither dared look round. Once Lily half turned towards her husband, to find him half turned towards her with a crimson strangling face, and both looked hastily away again. The plight was desperate, and after a moment Lily said, in a choking, baritone vo
ice:

  “Toby, stop laughing.”

  There was no answer, and she gave him another moment for recuperation. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him wiping away the moisture of laughter. Then with a violent effort he subdued the muscles round his mouth.

  “She’s an old darling,” he said; “but, Lily, I shouldn’t have liked your grandmother.”

  Lily heaved a long sigh, herself again.

  “Toby, you behaved very well,” she said, “and mother is an old darling. Come, we’ll go out.”

  Mrs. Murchison took her cheerful presence away after three days, as she was sailing to America almost immediately, and the two were alone for the next week. Spring had definitely come, and day after golden day ran its course. Life, eternally renewed with the year, had burst from its winter chrysalis, and stood poised a moment with quivering, expanding wings before launching itself into the half-circle of summer months. Everywhere, on field and tree, the effervescence of green and growing things foamed like some exquisite froth. One morning they would rise to see that the green buds on the limes had split, shedding their red sheaths; on another, the elms were in sudden tiny leaf; on another, the mesh of new foliage round the willows of the water’s edge would make a delighted wonder for them. The meadows were scarce starred with pink-edged daisies when the buttercups sowed a sunshine on the fields, and in cool, damp places yellow-eyed forget-me-nots reflected the pale blue they gazed at so steadfastly. Toby and his wife would spend long, lazy mornings in the punt or drive about the deep-banked, primrosed lanes — he all tenderness and solicitude for her, she happier than she had known it was given to mankind to be. They talked but little; to both it seemed that their joy lay beyond the region of words.

  On the evening of one such day they were strolling about the garden as dusk fell. Birds called in the thickets and shrubs, now and then a rising fish broke the mirror of the river, and each moment the smell of the earth, as the dew fell, grew more fragrant.

  “I wish we were going to stay here a long time,” said Lily, her arm in his; “but we must go up to London when Parliament meets after the Easter holidays. The M.P.! Good gracious, Toby, to think that the welfare of your country depends upon a handful of people of whom you are one!”

  “Parliament may go hang,” said Toby, “and Jack will be delighted to let us stay here just as long as you like.”

  “I am sure of it, but I don’t like. What do you suppose I wanted you to get into Parliament for, if you were not going near the House?”

  “Never could guess,” said Toby. “It’s much more important that you should stop here if you want to.”

  “Don’t be foolish — but, oh, Toby, when my time comes let me come down here again. It was here we were engaged; let it be here you take your first-born in your arms. I do want that.”

  She turned to him with the light of certain motherhood in her eyes, a thing so wonderful that the souls of all men are incomplete until they have seen it, and her beauty and her love for him made him bow his head in awe. His wholesome humble soul was lost in an amazement of love and worship.

  “It shall be so, Toby?” she asked, with a woman’s delight in learning how unnecessary that question was. “Will my lord grant the request of his handmaiden?”

  “Ah, don’t,” he said suddenly. “Don’t say that, even in jest.”

  “Then will you, Toby?” she asked.

  “If my queen wills it,” said he.

  “Nor must you say that, even in jest,” she said.

  “I don’t; I say it in earnest — in deadly earnest. It is the truest thing in the world.”

  “In the world? Oh, Toby, a big place! Then that is settled.”

  She took his arm again, and they strolled slowly over the short velvet of the grass.

  “Toby, there is another thing I want,” she said after a moment.

  “It is yours — you know that.”

  “I’m glad of it, then, because I don’t think you will like it. It is this: I want you to see Lord Comber, and just shake hands with him.”

  Toby stopped.

  “I can’t,” he said— “I simply can’t.”

  “Think over it. You see, Toby, it is like this: you are part of me, and before this wonderful thing that is coming comes, I want to be ‘all square’ with everybody in the world. That’s one of your silly golf expressions, so you’ll understand it. And I can’t be while you are not. Don’t misunderstand me; it isn’t that I don’t feel as you do about him, and if I had been you and knocked him down as you did, I think I should have kicked him as he lay on the pavement. But now it is over.”

  “Lily, you don’t know what you ask,” said Toby. “If I had any reason to believe the man was sorry, that he had even any idea what a vile worm he is, it would be different. No doubt he had a bad time that day, for, as I told you, his tie was no better tied than mine; but having a bad time is not the same as being sorry, is it?”

  “No,” said Lily thoughtfully; “but whether he’s sorry or not is not our concern; it doesn’t affect what we ought to feel. He was vile; if he had not been, there would be nothing to forgive. Besides, you knocked him down. People ought to shake hands after they have fought; and I want you to.”

  “That is the best argument you have given me yet,” said Toby.

  “I don’t want it to be an argument at all; I don’t want my wish to be any reason at all why you should do it. You must do it because you agree with me.”

  “But I don’t,” said Toby.

  “Well, tell me when you would shake hands with him,” she said. “Would you this day fifty years?”

  “No,” said Toby.

  “Would you if he was dying, or if you were?”

  “I think I should; yes, I should.”

  “Oh, but, Toby, it is far more important to live in charity with people than to die in charity with them! Oh, indeed — indeed it is!” She stopped, and turned round, facing him, and all her soul shone in her eyes. “Indeed it is, Toby!” she said again.

  Toby looked at her for a long moment, then drew her nearer him.

  “Oh, my love!” he said, “what have I done to deserve any part of you? It is as you wish; how can you doubt it? How can I do otherwise?”

  She smiled at him.

  “But why do you do as I wish, Toby?” she asked. “It must not be because I want you to.”

  Toby was much moved; never before had the wonder and splendour of love so held him.

  “Oh, my beloved,” he said, “it is because God has ordained that all you wish is right; I can give you no other reason.”

  Dusk began to fall layer on layer over the sky. In the west the sunken sun still illuminated a fleece of crimson cloud that hovered above it, and round them the gray, long English twilight grew more solemn and intense. The outlines of shadows melted and faded into the neutral tint of night, and from the house behind, and from the cottages that clustered together across the river, lights began to twinkle, and the wheeling points of remotest heaven were lit overhead. The crimson in the west died into the velvet blue of the sky, and in the east the horizon was dove-coloured with the imminent moon-rise. And as the two walked they spoke together, as they had not spoken before, of the dear event which June should bring.

  To Lily, the happiness which, please God, should be hers lay in depths too abysmal for thought to plumb; and Toby for the first time fully understood how compassion, and no other feeling, had whole possession of her soul, when she had been with Kit and Jack all that terrible day, hardly more than a week ago. For that which had been to Kit a thing to dread was to the other the crown of her life, and that the experience to herself so blessed could be anything different to another woman called for pure pity. And other feelings — amazement, horror, shame — were trivial and superficial compared to that; it swept them utterly out of possibility of existence. The woman, the mother, had been between them a bond insoluble.

  And Kit, so Toby thought, had felt something of this. For the five days that had followed, he himse
lf had seen almost nothing of his wife; she had been all day at the house in Park Lane, and had twice slept there. Kit in the weakness and exhaustion of those days had held on, as if to a rock, to the sweet strength and womanliness of the other; that was the force that pulled her back to life.

  That evening when they went in, Lily found waiting for her a letter from Jack, saying that the doctor had sanctioned Kit’s being moved in a week’s time, provided she went on as well as she was doing, and that they proposed to come down to Goring. One condition, however, Jack made himself, that Lily should telegraph quite candidly (he trusted her for this) whether she and Toby would rather they did not come. She laughed as she read the note, and sent her answer without even consulting Toby.

  CHAPTER VII. THE SECOND DEAL

  It was some eight weeks after Easter that Mr. Alington decided to make the next move in the game of Carmel, a move which should be decisive and momentous. He would have preferred for certain reasons to put it off a little while yet, for he had much on his hands, but the balance on the whole inclined to immediate action. During the last four or five months he had done a considerable deal of business as a company-promoter, and at the present moment had some half-million of pounds engaged in other affairs than mines. Motor-cars in particular had much occupied him, and he was the happy possessor of many patents for noiseless tires, automatic brakes, simpler steering-apparatus, and what not. He was a man of really large ideas where money was concerned, and a perfect godsend to patentees, for his policy was to buy up any invention concerning motors which possessed even the most modest merit, in the hopes that, say, in two years’ time every motor-car that was built must probably carry one or more of the patents owned by him. He had, indeed, at the present moment in England not more than twenty thousand pounds which he could conveniently devote to the booming of Carmel, but there was lodged with Mr. Richard Chavasse in Melbourne a sum of not less than fifty thousand pounds, with which it was his purpose to supply the “strong support in Australia,” to the end that Carmel should rise rainbow-hued above the ruck of all other mines. Altogether his position was a good one, for the last six weeks had brought him from his manager the most excellent private accounts of the mine, which for the most part he had saved up till the booming began. Mr. Linkwood also advised very strongly a fresh issue of shares. They had at present, for instance, only an eighty-stamp mill, whereas at the rate at which they were now getting gold out there was easily work for a mill of a hundred and fifty or two hundred stamps.