by E. F. Benson
Then suddenly an idea occurred to him which held out certain promise of relief at least, in that he could communicate his trouble, and he thought of the Hermit Merivale had always an astonishingly cooling effect on him; it was a pleasure in itself, especially to a feverish, excitable mind like his, to see anyone, and that a friend, who, with great intellectual and moral activity, was so wonderfully capable of resting, of not worrying; restful, too, would be the glades of the immemorial forest. And no sooner had the idea struck him than his mind was made up; a telegram to the Hermit, a hurried glance at a railway guide, and a bag into which he threw the requisites of a night, were all that was required. He had just time to eat a hurried lunch, and then started for Waterloo.
The day had been hot and sunny when he left London, and promised an exquisite summer afternoon in the country, where the freshness would tone down a heat that in town was rather oppressive. But this pleasant probability, as the train threw the suburbs over its shoulder, did not seem likely to be fulfilled, for the air, instead of getting fresher, seemed to gather sultriness with every mile. Evelyn was himself much of a slave to climatic conditions, and this windless calm, portending thunder, seemed to press down on his head with dreadful weight. Even the draught made by the flying train had no life in it; it was a hot buffet of air as if from a furnace mouth. Then, as he neared his destination, the sky began to be overcast, lumps of dark-coloured cloud, with hard, angry edges of a coppery tinge began to mount in the sky, coming up in some mysterious manner against what wind there was. This, too, when he got out at Brockenhurst, was blowing in fitful, ominous gusts, now raising a pillar of dust along the high road, then dying again to an absolute calm. Directly to the south the clouds were most threatening, and the very leaves of the trees looked pale and milky against the black masses of the imminent storm. Yet it was some vague consolation, though he hated thunder anywhere, to know how much more intolerable this would be in London, and he arrived at the cottage glad that he had come.
It was about four when he got there, and the first thing he saw on entering was a telegram on the table in the hall, still unopened, which he rightly conjectured to be the one he had himself sent. In this case clearly the Hermit was out when it arrived, and had not yet returned; so, leaving his bag at the foot of the stairs, he passed out on to the verandah. There, looking out over the garden, and alone, sat Madge. She turned on the sound of his step, and, whether it was that the dreadful colour of the day played some trick with his eyes or not, Evelyn thought she went suddenly white.
She rose and came towards him with a miserable semblance of a smile, not with that smile with which, in the portrait, she laughed at the worries of the world and all its ups and downs. She was not laughing at them now; her smile did not rise from within. Her voice, too, was a little strange; it faltered. And it was clear that speaking at all was an effort to her. “This is quite unexpected, Mr. Dundas,” she said. “I had no idea, nor, I think, had Mr. Merivale, that you were coming.”
Evelyn said nothing; he did not even hold out his hand in answer to hers; he but looked at her, but looked with an unquenchable thirst. But then he found speech and a sort of manners.
“I did not know either till this morning,” he said; “but then I telegraphed. I fancy Tom has not received it — not opened it anyhow; there is a telegram for him at least on the table inside, which I guess is mine. I did not know you were here either.”
Then his voice rose a little.
“Indeed, I did not,” he said.
The girl passed her hand wearily over her brow, brushing back her hair. She was hatless — her hat lay on the table, where still the platters of their frugal lunch remained, since they had started on their tour of inspection as soon as that meal was over.
“Oh, no, I believe you!” she said. “Why should you assert it like that? But there is a storm coming. I hate thunder. And I was alone.”
Certainly the dreadful tension of the atmosphere had communicated itself to these two. Madge was, at any rate, frightfully aware that her speech was not wise. But wisdom had gone to the vanishing point. This meeting had been so unthinkably unexpected. In a way it stunned her, just as the approaching storm made her unnormal, unlike herself. But she had wits enough left to laugh — the conventional laugh merely, that is like the inverted commas to a written speech.
“I suppose I had better explain myself and my presence here,” she said. “My mother asked Mr. Merivale if we might come down and see the simplification of life on its native heath. So we came and lunched here. Then we all three went for a walk, but I was tired and headachy, and turned back. They went on. I knew a storm was coming, though when we set out it was quite clear. I told them so. And in the last ten minutes it has come up like the stroke of a black wing. Ah!”
She shut her eyes for a moment as a violent flicker of lightning cut its way down from the clouds in the south, and waited, still with shut eyes, for the thunder.
“It is still a long way off,” said Evelyn, as the remote growl answered.
“I know, but if you had seen the sky an hour ago. It was one turquoise. And I daren’t go back to Brockenhurst. I must stop here and wait for them.”
“May I take you back?” asked Evelyn.
“No; what good would that do? I may as well be terrified here as on the road. Also I can keep dry here.”
Again she winced as the lightning furrowed its zig-zag path through the clouds. This time the remoteness of the thunder was less reassuring; there was an angry, choking clap, which suggested that it meant business.
By this time Evelyn had recovered himself from the first stabbing surprise of finding Madge alone here. Her terror, too, of the approaching storm had drowned his dislike of it; also, for the moment, at any rate, his ordinary, natural instinct of alleviating the mere physical fear of this girl drowned the more intimate sense of what she was to him. If only she might become thoroughly frightened and cling to him — for this outrageous possibility did cross his mind — how he would rejoice in the necessity that such an accident would force on him the necessity, since he knew that he would be unable to offer resistance, of saying that which he had told Merivale only a few days before he felt he could not help saying! But to do him justice, he dismissed such a possibility altogether; that it had passed through his mind he could not help, but all his conscious self rejected it.
Then, at the moment of the angry answering thunder, a few big splashes of rain began to star the dry gravel-path below them, hot, splashing drops, like bullets. They fell with separate, distinct reports on the leaves of the lilacs and on the path; they hissed on the grass, they whispered in the yielding foliage of the roses of the pergola, and were like spirit-rappings on the roof of the verandah.
And Madge’s voice rose in suppressed terror:
“Oh, where are they?” she cried. “Why don’t they come back? He can’t make the lightning just sit on his finger like the thrush. Shall we go to meet them? Oh, go to meet them, Mr. Dundas!”
“And leave you alone?” he asked.
Madge’s wits had thoroughly deserted her.
“No, don’t do that,” she cried. “Let’s go indoors, and pull down the blinds and do something. What was that game you suggested once, that you should go out of the room while I thought of something, and that then you should come back and try to guess it. Anything, draughts, chess, surely there is something.”
Evelyn felt strangely master of himself. At least, he knew so well what was master of him that it came to the same thing. He had certainty anyhow on his side.
“Yes, let us come indoors,” he said. “I know my way about the house. There is a room on the other side; we shall see less of it there; I hate thunder too. But you need have no earthly anxiety about Lady Ellington. They may get wet, but that is all. There then, stop yours ears; you will hear it less.”
But he had hardly time to get the words out before the reverberation came. Again clearly, business was meant, immediate business too; the thunder followed nervously
close on the flash. And at that Madge fairly ran into the house, stumbling through the darkness in the little narrow hall, and nearly falling over the bag that Evelyn had left there. True though it was that she disliked thunder, she did not dislike it to this point of utterly losing her head in a storm. But, just as her nerves were physically upset, so, too, her whole mind and being was troubled and storm-tossed by this unexpected meeting with Evelyn, and the two disorderments reacted and played upon one another. Had there been no thunderstorm she would have faced Evelyn’s appearance with greater equanimity; had he not appeared she would have minded the thunderstorm less. But she braced herself with a great effort, determined not to lose control completely over herself. And the effort demanded a loan from heroism — physical fear, the fear that weakens the knees and makes the hands cold, is hard enough in itself to fight against, but to fight not only against it but against a moral fear, too, demands a thrice braver front.
She, too, remembered in their tour over the house the room of which Evelyn had spoken. It looked out, as he said, in the other direction, and she would, at any rate, not see here the swift uprush of the storm. It was very dark, not only from the portentous sootiness of the sky, but because the big box hedge stood scarcely a dozen yards from the window. Here Evelyn followed her, and, striking a match, lit a couple of candles. He also had by now got a firmer hand over himself, but at the sight of Madge sitting there, a sort of vision of desolateness, his need for her, the need too that she at this moment had for comfort, almost mastered him, and his voice was not wholly steady.
“There, you’ll be better here,” he said, “and candles are always reassuring, are they not? You will laugh at me, but I assure you that if I am alone in a storm I turn on all the electric light, shut the shutters, and ransack the house for candles and lamps. Then I feel secure.”
Madge laughed rather dismally.
“Yes, thanks, that makes me feel a little better,” she said. “It is something anyhow to know one has a companion in one’s unreasonableness. I don’t know what it is in a thunderstorm that agitates me; I think it is the knowledge of the proximity of some frightful force entirely outside the control of man, that may explode any moment.”
Evelyn had turned to shut the door as she spoke, but at this a sort of convulsive jerk went through him, and involuntarily he slammed it to. There was something of deadly appropriateness in the girl’s words; indeed, there was a force in proximity to her outside her control. He could not even feel certain that it was within his own, whether he was able to stop the explosion. But her previous conduct to him, her refusal to sit again, her saying that he bored her, her refusal even to see him when he paid an ordinary call, were all counter-explosions, so to speak.
The noise of the door that he had banged startled him not less than her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t know how I did that. It flew out of my fingers, as servants say when they break something.”
The first slow, hot drops of rain that had been the leaking of the sluices of heaven, had given place to a downpour of amazing volume and heaviness. In the windless air the rain fell in perpendicular lines of solid water, as if from a million inexhaustible squirts, rattling on the roof like some devil’s tattoo, and hissing loud in the hedge outside. The gurgling of the house gutters had increased to a roar, and every now and then they splashed over, the pipes being unable to carry away the water. But for the last few minutes there had been no return of the lightning, and the air was already a little cooler and fresher, the tenseness of its oppression was a little relieved. And in proportion to this Madge again rather recovered herself.
“I really am most grateful to you, Mr. Dundas,” she said, “for your arrival. I don’t know what I should have done here alone. Did you come down from London this morning?”
Evelyn drew a chair near her and sat down.
“Yes, I settled to come quite suddenly,” he said. “I had meant to work all day, and I did for half an hour or so, but everything else looked ugly, I could not see either colour or form properly....”
“Everything else?” said Madge unsuspectingly; his phrase was ambiguous; she did not even distantly guess what he meant.
“Yes, everything else, except my portrait of you,” he said shortly.
There was a pause of unrivalled awkwardness, and the longer it lasted the more inevitable did the sequel become.
“I must ask you something,” said Evelyn at length. “I ask it only in common justice. Do you think you are treating me quite fairly in refusing to sit for me again? For I tell you plainly, you cheat me of doing my best. And when one happens to be an artist of whatever class, that is rather a serious thing for anybody to do. It means a lot to me.”
His words, he knew, were rather brutal; it was rather brutal too to take advantage of this enforced tête-à-tête. But he could not pause to think of that; he knew only that unless he said these things he could not trust himself not to say things less brutal, indeed, but harder for her to hear. He could not quite tell how far he had himself in control. She had put out one hand as he began, as if to ward off his question; but as he went on it fell again, and she sat merely receiving what he said, sitting under it without shelter.
“You have no right to treat me like that,” he continued. “We part at my door, as far as I know, perfectly good friends one day, two days afterwards I am told that you cannot sit to me again. What can I have done? Have I done anything? Is it my fault in any way?”
She looked at him once imploringly.
“Please, please don’t go on asking me,” she said.
But she could not stop him now; his own bare rights justified his questions, and there was that behind which urged him more strongly than they.
“Is it my fault in any way?” he repeated.
Then a sort of despairing courage seized the girl; she would nerve herself to the defence of her secret whatever happened.
“No, it is not your fault,” she said.
“Then when you told Philip that it was because I bored you — —”
“Did he tell you that?” she asked.
“Yes, he told me. It was not his fault. I made him practically. He could not have refused me.”
She thought intently for a moment, unable to see where her answer would lead her, or, indeed, what answer to give. In that perplexity she took the simplest way out, and told the truth.
“Yes, I said that,” she said. “But it was not true.”
“Then, again, I ask you why?” said he.
She felt that she must break if he went on, and made one more appeal.
“Ah, I beg of you not to question me,” she cried. “You talk of justice too — is it fair on me that you use the accident of finding me alone here in this way? I can’t go away, you know that, there is no one here to protect me. But if you by a single other question take advantage of it, I shall leave the house, just as I am, in this deluge, and walk back to the hotel. I must remind you that I am an unprotected girl, and you, I must remind you, are a gentleman.”
She rose with flashing eyes; it had taxed all her bravery to get this out, but it had come out triumphant.
But the moment had come; all the force that had been gathering up was unable to contain itself in him any longer. One terrific second of calm preceded the explosion, and, as if Nature was following the lines of this human drama, for that second the downpour of the blinding rain outside was stayed. Inside and out there was a moment’s silence.
“I know all that,” he said quietly, “but I can’t help myself. It is not for the picture — that doesn’t matter. It is for me. Because I love you.”
Madge threw her arms wide, then brought them together in front of her as if keeping him off, and a sort of cry of triumph that had begun to burst from her lips ended in a long moan. Then the room for a moment was so suddenly illuminated by some hellish glare that the candle burned dim, and simultaneously a crack of thunder so appalling shattered the stillness that both leaped apart.
&n
bsp; “Oh, something is struck!” she cried. “It was as if it was in the very room: Is it me? Is it you? Oh, I am frightened!”
But Evelyn hardly seemed to notice it.
“That is why — because I love you,” he said again.
For the moment Madge could neither speak nor move. That sudden double shock, the utter surprise of it all, and, deep down in her heart, the tumult of joy, stunned her. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.
“You must go away at once, or I,” she said. “We can’t sit in the same room.”
“But you don’t hate me, you don’t hate me for what I have said?” cried he.
“Hate you?” she said. “No, no, I” — and a sob for the moment choked her— “no, you must not think I hate you.”
Just then the sound of a footfall outside and a voice in the hall struck in upon them, and Madge’s name was called. In another moment the door opened and Lady Ellington entered, followed by Merivale.
“Ah, there you are, Madge!” she said. “Has it not been appalling? A tree was struck close to —— Mr. Dundas?” she said, breaking off.
Evelyn came a step forward. By a difficult, but on the whole a merciful arrangement, whatever private crisis we pass through, it is essential that the ordinary forms of life be observed. The solid wood may be rent and shattered, but the veneer must remain intact. This is merciful because our thoughts are necessarily occupied in this way with trivial things, whereas if they were suffered to dwell entirely within, no brain could stand the strain.
“Yes, I got here just before the storm began,” he said, “and Miss Ellington and I have been keeping each other company. We both hate thunder.”