by E. F. Benson
But in this balance and adjustment of the human soul to the anguish with which circumstance and fate visit it, the mechanism of its infliction is wonderfully contrived, so that it shall not snap under the strain. The Angel of Pain, we must suppose, sits by, with the screws and levers of the rack under its control; it loosens one, as Evelyn’s dread about disfigurement had been loosened for the present at any rate, since it was, perhaps, more than he could stand (and the Angel of Pain, with the relentless hands but the tender eye and pitying mouth, had not finished with him yet) but it tightens another; the fact of his blindness had been screwed down very tight. Then as the racked sinews and tortured nerves began to writhe and agonise less, another little torture was added. It was but a small thing compared to the others, and though it had been there all the time, neither Madge nor he had noticed it at first. But now when he was weary with pain, it was like a fly that kept buzzing and settling on his face, while his hands were bound, so that he could not brush it off. It had seemed but fear of the imagination at first, but gradually to both of them, as he recovered so well, and the future as well as the present began to make itself felt again, it became terribly real. It was simply this: What was to happen to them? How among other things were their doctor’s and nurse’s bills to be paid? And how, after that, were they going to live?
For several days each suffered the buzzing, flittings and alightings of this without speaking of it to the other, since each believed that the other had not yet thought of it. But one afternoon they had been talking of that hot August month in London, with their childish tales of Ellesdee, and the curious fact that if you only make a game out of a privation, the privation ceases and the game becomes entrancingly real. Evelyn had laughed over this.
“We shall have heaps of games in the future,” he had said unthinkingly, and stopped rather abruptly. In the silence that followed he heard Madge just stir in her chair; an assent had dropped from her lips, but she had said no more, and it was clear to them both that their thoughts had met. Then Evelyn spoke.
“Madge, has it ever occurred to you what we are going to do?” he said. “How we are going to live, I mean?”
“Yes, dear, I have thought about it a good deal. I didn’t speak of it, since I hoped you wouldn’t begin to think about it yet.”
“There were forty-three pounds?” he said; “from which you have to subtract our railway fares.”
“Yes, dear,” she said almost inaudibly.
The Angel of Pain turned that screw a little more. They could bear a little more of that.
“There is an unfinished portrait of Lady Taverner,” said he. “There is the finished portrait of you. But even if we sold those, what next, what afterwards?”
“Ah, there is no necessity to think about it,” said Madge quickly. “Of course mother will help us. She will do what she can. And Guy Ellington, of course — —”
“We shall have to live on their alms, you mean?” said he with a sudden dreadful bitterness. “On the pity of others? They can’t do it, besides. They can’t support us. And even if they could, how could we accept it?”
His hand, with the rapid, hovering movement so characteristic of the blind, felt over the bedclothes and found hers. He was acquiring this blind touch with extraordinary rapidity.
“Madge, do you hate me for having married you?” he asked. “Would it have been better for you if we had never seen each other? Here are you, tied — eternally tied — to a beggar and a cripple, half a man with half a face!”
For one moment she winced at the thought of that which she did not yet know. Supposing it was very terrible, supposing she cried out at it? But she recovered herself at once.
“I bless God every day for your love, dear,” she said.
He was silent after this a little, his fingers playing over hers.
“I am getting blind man’s hands already,” he said. “I can feel which your rings are. There, that is the wedding-ring, that is easy, and the one with sapphires in it. No, it can’t be that, there are four stones in this, and there are only three sapphires. Ah, that is the ruby ring; do you remember how you scolded me for giving it you? Then on the next finger one pearl: that is easy. Then the first finger, no rings there, but — yes, at that knuckle the little scar that runs up halfway to the next knuckle, where you cut your finger to the bone when you were a girl over the broken glass.”
Madge felt herself suddenly turn white and cold. He had felt the little scar on her finger with absolute accuracy, tracing it from where it started to where it finished. And if he could do this with so little a scar, what of other scars that would be within reach of his hands always? He would find them out, too; he would guess; all their attempts at concealment from him of what his injuries really were would be futile. He must come to know.
But he was busy just now on the exploration of his powers of touch. It was a new game; already touch was beginning to be a new thing to him, and whereas he had regarded his hands hitherto as holders to grasp other things, prehensile endings to the arms merely, he was now beginning to find out new powers in the soft-tipped fingers. He was like a child which has hitherto regarded its legs merely as agreeable though silent play-fellows, who begins to see that a hitherto undreamed-of power of locomotion resides in them.
This was fascinating to Evelyn; for the moment there was a sudden hope springing up. It was like a message of relief coming to a beleagured garrison.
“Why, if I can do this already,” he said, “who knows what it may not grow to? Madge, I am sure I could not have felt so much before — before it happened. Quick, give me something, and I will tell you what it is. What if the form and the shape of things has not been annihilated for me?”
And so this game, for so it was, began to interest him. For him, since some measure of the excitement, the chance, the experimentalism of life, had begun to come back, the Angel of Pain relaxed the screws a little, yet her hands did not altogether leave them. But poor Madge! The Angel of the relentless hands and tender face looked gravely on her. She had to bear very much, and bear it with a smiling face and cheerful voice, fetching books for Evelyn to identify, and small objects from his dressing-case and what-not. The screws were turned rather smartly for her; it was inevitable that he should before very long identify his own face, identify the damage there. She herself had not done so yet, but awfully as she had feared that for herself, she now feared it more for him. He was building so much, she knew that, on a place where no foundation was possible. It would all sink into the mire and clay. He would learn, as she would have to learn, how dreadful that was: his sensitive, hovering fingers with their light touch and constructive imagination would build up and realise by degrees. He would know that the worst fear of all was fulfilled.
That view of his, which Madge knew so well he would take when he learned, one way or another, of the wreck that had come to his face, might or might not be a shallow view, but that view he would assuredly take, and construe her love for him into mere pity and forbearance. She did not love him for his face — he would not say that — but his face was part of him, and if that was spoiled, so surely was part of her love spoiled. Body and soul she had loved him, but how could a woman love a sightless, scarred thing? He would grant, no doubt, that her love for him went further than that which was now hideous, but would she, to put it from her own point of view, have scarred and hacked and blinded her own face, and gone back to him who saw, in perfect confidence that his love for her would be undiminished and undeterred, knowing that it lay too deep for any such superficial maiming to injure? She knew well she would not, for love, however spiritual, includes the body as well as the spirit, and however fine, cannot but take the body as the outward and visible sign of the beloved soul, its expression and aura. And how could he to whom the surface of beauty and loveliness had been by profession such a study and worship, still think, whatever her asseverations to the contrary, that her love for him was as complete as it had been? And, to get nearer the truth, would not he be right?
She did not know about that yet; she had not seen. At present she could not think of his face as other than it had been; all she knew was that, in spite of herself, she dreaded with her whole soul the removal of those bandages. What if she shrank and winced at the sight? Those slim, delicate fingers of the Angel of Pain tightened the screw, and the kind eyes looked at her, seeing how she bore it. If there was a terrible moment coming for Evelyn when his fingers, which were now to be to him his eyes, told him what he looked like, there was a moment, a double moment, coming for her. She had first to control herself, to make him believe, whatever she saw, that she saw no difference; nothing that made her love one jot less urgent and insistent; she had also, with a feigned conviction that had got to convince him, to assure him that his fingers were at fault, that there was no scar where he said there was a scar, that there was no empty hole.... That she knew. What she did not know was how to face it all.
At present, anyhow, by a great effort, she put off the moment which she foresaw must come. He could not remain indefinitely ignorant, his own hands must some day inform him. But just now he was eager and interested in this new game. By a splendid effort of vitality and will, he had pushed into the background the fact of his blindness: he had put it for the time being, anyhow, among the inevitable and accepted facts of life, while he had filled his foreground with the fact that he had eyes in his fingers. How glorious that bit of bravery was she knew well, for he was so brave that just now he was not even acting; he genuinely looked forward to the future, not without hope. At her bidding he had left the grinding difficulties of the future alone, he had left the question of the stark fact as to how they were to live, he had left also the fact of his own supreme deprivation, and with a splendid effort he looked on the possibilities that might lie in front of them, not on the limitations, cramping and binding, that certainly lay there.
“Yes, all those things are easy,” he said; “of course I can tell a toothpick and a sovereign-case, that is a mere effort of memory. But let’s go on, if you are not tired of it. You see, dear, you’ve got to educate me now; I am just a child again, learning a new set of letters. Now give me really new letters.”
Now Lady Dover a day before, in her quiet way, had telegraphed to London for a couple of packs of blind cards. They had the index in raised cardboard in the corner, and had arrived this morning. She had put them in the dressing-room adjoining his bedroom, and had just mentioned it to Madge, in the way that, had she been a stranger in the house, she might have mentioned where the bath-room was.
“Mr. Dundas is so eager and alive,” she had said, “that I thought, dear Madge, that he might like to begin any moment to accustom himself a little, poor fellow, to his new circumstances. So you will find a couple of packs of raised cards, I think they call them, in the dressing-room. I thought he might perhaps feel inclined to experiment with them.”
So Madge fetched them now, and a couple of minutes afterwards she and Evelyn were deep in a game of picquet. His childish pleasure in “new things” stood him in good stead now; he got as excited as a schoolboy over the riddle of what his hand contained. Again and again he fingered the raised index in the corner, with sudden bursts of triumph when he solved it to his own satisfaction.
“Ah, I used to call you slow at picquet, Madge,” he cried, “but you can’t retaliate. How very good for you! If you call me slow, I shall merely throw the cards away and burst into tears. Seven or nine, which on earth is it? Don’t look and tell me. I trust you not to look.”
But he soon got tired, and it is doubtful whether Madge was not more tired than he. When he waited long, feeling with those thin finger tips at the index, it was bad enough for her; but it was worse when he felt the card right almost immediately, and almost laughed with pleasure at his newly-acquired quickness — he, who used to be so quick! And all the time the certainty of the moment that was coming when he should learn all that had happened darkened her with an amazement of pity. What would he feel when he knew that? And what would she feel? And how, if that was very bad, would she have power to conceal it, so that he should believe, so that she could force him to believe that it was not there?
Two mornings after Madge slept on very late; but before she came down she had been in to see Evelyn, and subsequently had a talk to the nurse, who told her that Dr. Inglis had already seen her husband, and that he intended to take the bandages off his eyes that day. The wounds had healed in a manner almost marvellous, and they would now be the better for the air and light. And though Madge as she went downstairs felt that only thankfulness ought to be in her heart, she felt that she carried some sort of death-warrant in her pocket.
The post had just come in, and as she entered the breakfast-room, from which Lord Dover had already gone, but where his wife still waited for Madge, ready to make fresh tea on her entry, she found a letter by her plate directed in a handwriting that was very familiar to her. She wanted to open it at once, but instead she pushed it aside.
“What a glorious morning, dear Madge,” said Lady Dover. “Dr. Inglis has already made me his morning report. He has no further anxiety, I think, at all. I am so glad.”
She herself had a pile of letters, of which she had opened only about half, but abandoned them entirely to talk to Madge, and make her tea. But the sight of all those letters, somehow, diverted Madge’s attention from her own, and a sudden thought struck her, which was new.
“Lady Dover,” she said abruptly, “I believe you have been putting all manner of visitors off because of poor Evelyn.”
Lady Dover looked up in gentle, clear-eyed acquiescence.
“Why, my dear, it was most important he should be quite quiet,” she said.
Madge arrested the hand that was pouring out her tea.
“Ah, you dear,” she said, “and all these days I never thought of it, or thanked you.”
The spout of the teapot poured a clear amber stream on to the table-cloth.
“And I have spilt the tea, too,” said Madge. “But I do thank you, and — and I am frightened!”
“There is nothing wrong?”
“No; but they are going to take the bandages off, and what shall I see? Will you be there, too, and help me not to mind if it is dreadful? You see — you see, I suppose I loved his face as well, why not, and if all that is terribly changed.... They have told me it will be. And he must not guess that I mind, that I even see it is different. And when his hands tell him what has happened, as they will, I must still convince him somehow that to me there is no difference. Oh, I want help!” she cried. “Indeed it is not only for me, I want it for him — I must convince him that it does not matter.”
But at this point Lady Dover failed a little. She was not, in spite of her obvious kindness and sympathy, quite human enough to go to the depths that Madge’s gropings reached blind hands to. The trials and difficulties that came within her ken, the loss of someone loved, the parching of love in what had been a fountain, she could have understood, but the fear of a maimed face affecting love she could not quite grasp. Her idea of love may perhaps have been spiritually finer, it may also perhaps have not been adequately human.
There was a pause, anyhow, and since nothing but immediate and spontaneous reply was conceivable from Madge’s point of view, she took up her letter again.
“This, too,” she said, “it is from Philip.”
But to that Lady Dover responded instantly.
“Then, dear, you will want to read it alone,” she said. “And if you can tell me about it afterwards, and if I can be of any use, advising or suggesting, you will come to me, will you not? But, dear Madge, he would not write unless he had something very particular to say, and, personally, whenever I see a letter that may be very private, I always keep it till I am alone. So let me leave you alone, dear. I see they have brought in a fresh hot dish for you of some sort, and I have just made the tea. I shall be in my room.”
Here again tact played a great part; she did not look at Madge, either inviting or repelling confidenc
e. And without the least suspicion of hurry or of lingering she left the room, with her pile of letters, opened and unopened.
Madge waited a minute or two. Then with a sudden mechanical series of movements, she tore open the envelope, took out Philip’s letter, and read it. It was dated from Pangbourne.
My Dearest Madge.
I have every right to say that, and you must not mind. I heard only last night of the terrible thing that has happened to Evelyn, and unless I am stopped by a telegram from you or Lady Dover I shall come up to Glen Callan at once to see if I can be of any use. You will want somebody, anyhow, to look after you both when you move. I write to Lady Dover by the same post; she will receive my letter at the time you receive this. She will not mind my proposing myself — in fact she has asked me to before now.
I have just come here from the New Forest: you will not have heard what has happened. Tom Merivale is dead, the Hermit, you know. I will tell you about it all when we meet; now I can only say that the sorrows of the world were, I believe, suddenly revealed to him, and he died of it. And some of the sorrows of the world, you poor dear, have been revealed to Evelyn and you, and perhaps to me. Only we have got to live and not die.
And before we meet I want very sincerely and humbly to ask your pardon for all the hard things I have thought and said and done. Please try to grant it me before you see me, so that I know that it is implied in your handshake.
So unless you stop me you will see me on the evening of the day on which you get this, and before then I want you to grant me a further favour. You must accept, please, tacitly and without any word on the subject, just the little material assistance that I can give you and him. In other words, do not let any material anxiety increase or aggravate what you two have to endure, and which no one can help you about. Only where you can be helped, accept such help, and let the privilege of helping you be mine. In doing this you will be helping me more than I can say: you will be helping me to learn the lesson of the sorrows of the world, which, as I now know, we must all learn. And I am, — Your loving friend,