by E. F. Benson
Madge, too, played at trivialities.
“Ah, mother, you are drenched, soaking!” she cried. “What will you do?”
“I really urge you not to wait,” said Merivale. “Let me show you a room; get your things off and wrap up in blankets till your maid can come from Brockenhurst with some clothes. I will send a boy in with a note at once.”
Madge went upstairs with her mother to assist her, and Merivale came down again to rejoin Evelyn.
“I’ve only just seen your telegram,” he said, “but I’m delighted you have come. That’s a brave woman, that Lady Ellington. A tree was struck only a few yards from us, and she merely remarked that it was a great waste of electricity. But I’m glad it was wasted on the tree and not me.”
He scribbled a few lines and addressed them to Lady Ellington’s maid, and went off to get somebody to take the note into Brockenhurst. Then he came back to Evelyn.
The latter had not gone back to the room where he and Madge had sat during the storm, but was out on the verandah. Just opposite, on the other side of the river, was the tree that had been struck, not a hundred yards distant. One branch, as if in a burst of infernal anger on the part of the lightning, had been torn off, as a spider tears off the wing of a fly, and down the center of the trunk from top to bottom was scored a white mark, where the wood showed through the torn bark. But the tree stood still, no uprooting had taken place; but even now, in this windless calm, its leaves were falling — green, vigorous leaves, that seemed to know that the trunk and the sap that sustained them were dead. They fell in showers, a continuous rain of leaves, until the ground beneath was thick with them. All the pride of the beech’s summer glory was done; in an hour or two the tree would be as leafless as when the gales of December whistled through it. What mysterious telegraphy of this murderous disaster had passed through the huge trunk, that had sent the message to the uttermost foliage like this; some message which each leaf knew to be terribly true, so that it did not wait for the dismantlement of the autumn, but even now, in full vigour of green growth, just fell and died? Somehow that seemed to Evelyn very awful and very inevitable; the citadel had fallen, struck by a bolt from above, and in the uttermost outworks the denizens laid down their arms. Something, too, of the sort had happened to himself in the last hour; he had told Madge the secret of his life, that which made every artery fill and throb with swift electrical pulsation of rapturous blood, and it had all passed into nothingness. She had said she did not hate him; that was all. His recollection, indeed, of what had happened after he had told her was still rather dim and hazy; there had been a terrific clap of thunder, she had said she did not hate him; then her mother and Merivale came in.
Then, as the falling leaves from the tree might be gathered and put in a heap, at any rate, the shattered fragments of the afternoon began to piece themselves together again. She had confessed that she had said he bored her, she had confessed also that that was not true. What did that mean? She had said she did not hate him. What did that mean? And was her utter disorderment of mind, that hopeless, appealing agitation which had been so present in her manner throughout, merely the result of the thunderous air? Or was there something else that agitated her, his presence, the knowledge that she had behaved inexplicably? And — was it possible that the tree should live again after that rending furrow had been scored on it?
Merivale soon returned, still smilingly unruffled, and still in soaking clothes. But he seemed to be unconscious of them, and sat down in the verandah by Evelyn. Since that terrific clap there had been no return of the thunder, but the rain was beginning to fall again, slow, steady, and sullen from the low and dripping sky. He saw at once that something had happened to Evelyn; he was trembling like some startled animal. But since he held that to force or even suggest a confidence was a form of highway robbery, he forbore from any questioning.
“So you were with Miss Ellington during the storm,” he said. “How I love that superb violence of elements! It is such a relief to know that there are still forces in the world which are quite untamable, and that by no possibility can Lady Ellington divert the lightning into accumulators, which will light our houses.”
Evelyn turned on him a perfectly vacant face; he seemed not to have heard even.
“What did Lady Ellington do?” he asked.
“She attended when I talked to her,” said the Hermit, with pardonable severity.
Evelyn pulled himself together.
“Look here, something’s happened,” he said briefly. “It’s — I’ve told her that I love her. And that’s all; it’s a rope dangling in the air, nothing more happened. She just said I had better go to another room. She made no direct answer at all; she wasn’t even shocked.”
Then the tiny details began to be gathered in his mind, as if a man swept the fallen leaves from the stricken tree into a heap.
“She gave a sort of cry,” he said, “but at the end it was a moan. She threw her arms wide, and then held them to keep me off. What does it mean? What does it all mean?”
He got up quickly and began walking up and down the verandah.
“Where is she?” he said. “I must see her again. I must say what I said again, and tell her she must answer me.”
The Hermit, for all his inhuman life, had some glimmerings of sense.
“You must do nothing of the sort,” he said. “You don’t seem to realise what you have done already. Why, she is engaged to Philip, to your friend, and you have told her you love her. Good gracious, is not that enough to make her moan?”
“I told you I should a week ago,” said Evelyn.
“Yes, but you told me that conditionally. You said you would do so when you saw she loved you. Instead —— Good heavens! Evelyn, you must be unaware of what you have done. You were left with the girl during a thunderstorm, a thing that excites you and terrifies her, and you took advantage of your excitement and her terror to say this. It’s ugly; it’s beastly. But I can say it isn’t like you.”
Evelyn showed no sign of resenting this. As far as the mere criticism of what he had done was concerned, he appeared merely to feel a speculator’s interest in how it all struck another spectator. Even Lady Ellington’s hard, polished mind could not have presented a surface more impervious to scratches.
“You speak as if I did it all intentionally,” he remarked. “But I never intended anything less. It had nothing to do with what I could control. I had no more power over it than I had over the thunderstorm. After all, you don’t blame your thrush for eating worms. If one acts instinctively, nobody has any right to blame me. Besides, I don’t want your moral judgment. I just want to know what it means. You have called me a Pagan before now, and I did not deny it. But there I am. I don’t happen to like the colour of your hair, but I accept it. It seems to me buttery, if you want to know. And I seem to you Pagan, without conscience, you think I have acted uglily. Very well.”
Merivale hesitated a moment; he had no desire to say hard things because they were hard. On the other hand, he felt that the game must be played, rules had to be observed, or human life broke up in confusion, as if the fielders in a game of cricket would not run after the ball or the bowler bowl. He himself did not go in for cricket, he deliberately stood aside, but the rules were binding on those who played. Yet it was no use trying to convince a person who fundamentally disagreed.
“Well, you asked me,” he said, “and I have given you my opinion. That’s all. Nobody’s opinion is binding on anyone else. But I do ask you to think it over.”
Evelyn gave a little click of impatience.
“Think it over!” he said. “What else do you suppose I should be thinking about, or what else have I thought about for days?”
Merivale shook his head.
“Try to get outside yourself, I mean, and look at what you have done from any other standpoint than your own. You say you couldn’t help telling her. Well, there are certain things one has got to help, else — —”
He stopped; it was no
use talking. But Evelyn wanted to hear.
“Else?” he suggested.
“Else you had better not mix with other people at all,” said Merivale. “You have better reason for turning hermit than I. You have told a girl who is engaged to your friend that you love her. Think over that!”
NINTH
IN spite of her wetting Lady Ellington felt she had had a most interesting day, when, an hour later, she drove back with Madge and her maid to Brockenhurst. She was not in the least afraid of having caught cold, because her physical constitution was, it may almost be said, as impervious to external conditions as her mind. That frightful flash of lightning, too, which had shattered the now leafless tree, had also, as we have seen, been powerless to upset the even balance of her nerves, and had only evoked a passing regret that so much electric force should be wasted. She could, therefore, observe with her customary clearness that something had occurred to agitate Madge, and though the thunderstorm alone might easily account for this — where Madge had got her nerves from she could not conjecture, there was nothing hereditary about them, at any rate, as far as her mother was concerned — yet it required no great exercise of constructive imagination to connect Evelyn’s sudden appearance with this agitation. She remembered also Madge’s refusal to see him the other day, and her rather unaccountable postponement of the sitting. A few well-chosen questions, however, would soon settle this, and these she delivered that evening after dinner, firing them off like well-directed shots at a broad target. She did not, to continue the metaphor, want to make bull’s eyes at once, a few outers would show her the range sufficiently well.
She had first, however, committed to writing on half-a-dozen sheets of the hotel paper her impressions of the day and the conversation of Mr. Merivale, in so far as it bore upon the simplification of life, and was pleased to find how considerable a harvest she had gathered in. Lady Ellington’s literary style had in perfection those qualities of clearness and sharp outline that distinguished her mind, and her document might have been a report for an academy of science, so well arranged and precise was it. There were no reflections of her own upon the matter; it was merely a chronicle of facts and conversation. This having been written, revised, and read aloud to Madge, she then marched with her gun to her position in front of the target.
“It was odd that Mr. Dundas should have appeared so unexpectedly, Madge,” she said. “You must have had some considerable time with him if he arrived before the storm began.”
Madge had been rather expecting this, and she winced under her mother’s firm, hard touch.
“Yes, he had been there about an hour before you came in,” she said. “I think your account is quite excellent, mother.”
This, if we consider it as an attempt to draw Lady Ellington off the subject of Evelyn, was quite futile. She did not even seem to notice that such an attempt had been made.
“And did you arrange about your further sittings?” she asked.
“I don’t think any more will be necessary,” replied Madge. “Philip agrees with me too.”
“And Mr. Dundas?”
“I don’t think he will ask me for any more either.”
Lady Ellington considered this a moment.
“But surely you had settled to have one more,” she said, “the one which you postponed.”
“Yes, but I think we all agree now that as far as I am concerned the picture is finished.”
Lady Ellington was not exactly puzzled; it would be fairer to say that though she did not quite know where this led, she was quite certain it led somewhere. It was not a puzzle; it was rather a clue. So she got behind a bush, as it were, and continued firing from there.
“He is a great friend of Philip’s, is he not?” she said. “I suppose you will see a good deal of him after your marriage?”
This sharp-shooting was frightfully trying to Madge’s nerves; she never knew where the next shot might be coming from. But in that it was now quite clear to her that shooting was going on, it was the part of wisdom to defend herself.
“Oh! I hope so,” she said, “he is charming. I expect he will be constantly with us.”
This was a little disconcerting; Madge had distinctly had the best of that exchange. But she was in the beleaguered position; she felt that at any moment she might have to give in. She had a wild desire simply to leave the room, for she wanted to be alone, and to think over all that she now knew, but the clock inexorably pointed to half-past nine only, and to say she was going to bed would simply strengthen whatever idea it was in Lady Ellington’s mind that prompted her questions. Maternal anxiety and solicitude, though the point of view of the mother was perhaps a little predominant, were the moving causes of them, if they were referred back to primary motives; to put it more bluntly yet, Lady Ellington merely wished for a guarantee that nothing of any sort had occurred which might, however remotely, influence the matrimonial design for her daughter which she had formed and Madge had agreed to carry out. That she had fears that things were running otherwise than smoothly — by smoothly being meant that the marriage would take place on the twenty-eighth of the month — would be an overstatement of the idea that prompted these questions, but she certainly wished for some convincing word that she need have none.
Now, in the art of conversation as generally expounded, provision is not made for one very important and common contingency. Of the two conversationalists one may be willing to talk of anything in the world except one subject, the other may for the time wish to talk about no other than that, and thus conversation becomes difficult. But it would often be a tactical error — a thing of which Lady Ellington was seldom guilty — for the person who wishes to speak of one subject only to batter the other with too many questions on it. It is often better to sit quietly down and wait, refusing with what politeness there may be handy to talk of anything else, and simply let silence do its stealthy work — for awkward silences are wearing, and the wearing effect is inevitably felt by the side which is willing to talk of any but the one subject. Lady Ellington perhaps had never formulated this in all its naked simplicity, but she had often before now put the theory into practice with masterly effect, and she did so now. There was, so to speak, but one gate through which the beleaguered garrison could make a sortie: round that she concentrated her forces. The beleaguered garrison knowing that, tried to make a sortie through every other gate first.
A long silence.
“That was a terrible storm this afternoon,” said Madge. “The rain fell in bucketsfull. I saw there were quite deep channels across the road along which we drove back here, which it had made.”
“I did not notice them,” said Lady Ellington.
Silence.
“Fancy Mr. Merivale cooking for himself and doing all the housework,” said Madge.
“Fancy!” said Lady Ellington.
Silence.
“Shall we go up after breakfast to-morrow?” asked Madge.
“Unless you would like to go before,” said her mother.
There is a terrible little proverb about being cruel only to be kind, and this benignant sort of torture exactly describes the procedure of Lady Ellington. Should there be — and she was quite sure there was — something going on in Madge’s mind with regard to Evelyn she was quite convinced that it would be better in every way that she should know about it. That was the ulterior kindness; the immediate cruelty was apparent — for Madge was on the edge of a crisis of nerves; a very little push might send her sprawling. If that then was the case, Lady Ellington distinctly wished that she should sprawl; if, on the other hand, there was nothing critical or agitating in her outlook, the little push would do no harm whatever, for a mind at peace does not have its tranquility upset by vague suggestions and indefinite suspicions.
But since poor Madge was far from owning just now that inestimable possession of a tranquil mind, in the silence that followed her third fiasco in making general conversation, she began to get restless and fidgetty. She opened a book and look
ed blankly at a page, and shut it again; she fingered the ornaments on the mantlepiece; she went to the open window and looked out for a considerable time into the hot, wet blackness, for the slow, steady rain was again falling, and the heavens wept from a sullen sky. The ridge of the forest below which stood Merivale’s house was directly opposite the window — she had seen that before night fell — and, like the thrush that came to his voiceless call, so now her spirit sped there to one who called for her. That sudden flash of lightning had not been more unexpected than Evelyn’s declaration to her that afternoon, nor had the thunder that followed it come quicker in response than she had come. And now she wondered, half with dread, half with a wild, secret hope, whether he had noticed that momentary self-betrayal that she had made. She knew that before she could think or control herself, a cry had been on her lips, her arms had flung themselves wide. True, as soon as her conscious brain could work, she had revoked and contradicted what she had done. But had he seen? How terrible if he had seen! How terrible if he had not!
What had become, she asked herself, of all her sober and sane conclusions of a week ago? She knew then that she loved him, that that which had been a stranger to her all her life, no pleasant domestic affection, but something wild, unbarred, almost brutal, yet how essential now to life itself, had dropped into her heart, as a stone drops into the sea, going down and down to depths unplumbable, yet still going down until the bottom — the limits of her soul — was reached. And he? Was she to him another such stone? Was she really sinking down and down in his heart, so steadily and inevitably that all the tides of all the seas might strive, yet could never cast that stone up again? It was such a little thing, yet no power on earth, unless the laws that govern the earth were revised and made ineffectual, could ever stay its course, if it moved under the same command as she. Each had to settle in the depths of the other. Once the surface was broken by the little splash, down that would go which made the splash, and whether in a wayside puddle or in the depths of mid-Atlantic, it would rest only where it touched bottom. Such was the sum of her wide-eyed staring into the blackness of the rain-ruled night. Then, still restless, she turned back again into the room, and faced not the world of dreams and solitary imaginings, of what must theoretically be the case, but the material side of it all, which indubitably had its word to say. On the table was the letter she had received an hour before dinner, forwarded from London, and expressing the pleasure of the donor in sending a wedding present; there too was her own answer of neatly-worded thanks, and, above all, there was her mother, patiently adamant. And the beleaguered garrison, though it knew that the enemy — that friendly enemy — awaited it, went out on a sortie too forlorn to call a hope through the only available gate.