Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  This table laid for dinner in one corner, the man’s littered desk, and the woman’s nook near the fireplace, all planted together in one big room out of the many big rooms that this great grey house contained, gave the note as of gipsy and unpremeditated encampment, and this was borne out also by the holland sheetings that had not been removed from the two big glass chandeliers which hung from the ceiling, and which loosely enveloped certain large articles of furniture, and made a pall in front of a bookcase. All this pointed to a sudden and temporary occupation, as if those who had taken possession of the house were content with the mere necessities of life, and gave no thought to its adornments and decorations. Such was indeed the case, for Lord Thurso and his sister, Lady Maud Raynham, had arrived here a few days ago only, preceded by a telegram to the caretaker to make habitable a bedroom for each of them, and a living-room for them together. They had come, in fact, suddenly and in mid-season, for in the village of Achnaleesh, over which Maud’s eyes now looked, a mile below the house, there had broken out, virulent and appalling, an epidemic of typhoid fever; and since Achnaleesh, like everything else within those wide horizons, was part of Lord Thurso’s immense Scotch property, it had been clear to him, without debate or question on the subject, that it was his business to leave town at once and come up here to see how far human efforts could avail to check this pestilence, and relieve the sufferings of those homes already stricken with it. His wife, however, though not her heart only, but her efforts and active support, were ever at the service of charitable schemes, had not in the least seen her way to accompanying him. If Thurso thought he had better go, by all means let him do so, but she failed to see what object there could be in her accompanying him which would compensate for the inconvenience of leaving town just now. For herself, she could see nothing gained by the journey of either of them, since he was in hourly communication with his agent, a reliable and careful man, who would see that everything medically desirable was carried out. But she was not aware how either his presence or hers would be conducive to the effectiveness of sanitary measures; yet, since she knew that her husband looked on many questions with a different eye from hers, she had no more attempted to dissuade him from going than he had tried to persuade her to come up with him. But it had seemed quite obvious to Maud that Thurso must not go by himself, and without either publicly or privately criticising his wife’s refusal to go, she had simply taken her place. Indeed, she had not even felt the inclination to criticise; the things that kept Catherine in London were such as could ill be cancelled. Maud had hardly offered her brother her companionship; she had just joined him at an early dinner, and driven to King’s Cross with him. Perhaps it seemed almost equally natural to him that she should come.

  In any case, the state of things which they found on their arrival seemed to them both to have rendered his coming imperative. Even in the last twenty-four hours there had been a portentous increase of cases, and a panic terror, such as is only possible among folks ignorant for the most part of all illness except such as shadows old age, and naturally of rude health, had seized the village at this sudden smiting down of the strongest and healthiest among them. Mixed with this panic, too, was the fear and distrust of doctors, and the inability to believe that it could be right, when a man was prostrate with the exhaustion of long-continued fever, to deny him a morsel of meat or a crust of solid food. Doctors were there and nurses, as Thurso had ordered, but it was the obedience to their orders which, till he came, had been so hard to enforce. For this alone he knew he had been right in coming himself, apart from the reason of sentiment which forbade him to be absent, since a word from him, his expressed wish, was more potent than all the orders that doctors might give. For feudal obedience to that long and kindly race of landlords was far more paramount than medical advice; and since the laird ranged himself on the side of the doctors, who ordered windows to be opened when all other folk of commonsense would be inclined to shut every chink and cranny by which air might enter and give cold to the patient, and forbade solid food even to those “puir bodies who had been crying out half the nicht for a bit of bread,” it was necessary to follow these inscrutable decrees, though wise heads were shaken over such unreasonable treatment. Lady Maud, too, had had the fever, and with her own mouth testified that even she, when all delicacies were within the reach of her purse, had been content with nothing but milk, and no bite of solid food. That, too, carried weight.

  Thurso had brought his valet up with him, but Maud’s maid had so clearly shown that she regarded the journey to the plague-stricken spot as equivalent to a sentence of death that she had left her behind in town, and the caretaker and his wife were the only other servants in the huge house that in autumn buzzed with attendance. Upstairs there was a bedroom for each of them, and below just this one half-shrouded room, in a corner of which they encamped, leaving the rest to holland sheeting. Otherwise the great house was at siesta, and to Maud, who only knew it hitherto when it was a kaleidoscope of guests, there was something attractive in its repose. She had come straight from the whirl of mid-season in London, at the time of the year when every day consists of forty-eight hours, and each hour of that day of a hundred and twenty minutes, all immensely occupied; and the contrast between the hour now, while she sat in the late evening sun in the window-seat waiting for Thurso to return, and the corresponding hour which was going on in London, when she would have been hurrying out to dinner, with a busy day behind her, and the opera and a ball to make short work of the night, gave her food for a certain quiet contentment. The contrast was so pleasantly violent; it was like that moment when one steps suddenly, out of the blare and brilliance of a ball-room, where one has enjoyed the waltz quite immensely, onto some quiet, tented balcony, with the trees of the park in front, and above the serenity of starlight. On a slightly larger scale that contrast was hers now. She had stepped out from London into the tranquillity of these Caithness moors. To say that she had not regretted leaving town would be untrue; she had, at any rate, regretted the clear necessity of leaving it, and coming up here with her brother. But it had been necessary for her to go; she could not possibly have done otherwise, and though she was sorry (if she allowed her mind to dwell on that) to have cut herself off from all the delightful things that were going on in town, from the ceaseless stream of friends whom one met all day and all night, and who were amusing themselves so diligently, even as she had been amusing herself, it was still quite clear that somebody must come up here with Thurso, and that, since Catherine did not propose to come, she was the obvious person to do so. But she no more wasted sighs over what she was missing in town than she wasted sighs when she lost a fish. That particular fish was off; she would angle for another fish instead. There were fish everywhere; there was no situation, as far as she knew, out of which nothing was to be captured. Here, indeed, she had her fish already hooked for her; she had come to keep house for Thurso, to make things cheerful for him as far as she could, to prevent his being a prey to boredom and depression when he came home in the evening after a long day spent in the fever-stricken village. She had already found that there was room for her skill.

  Nature had for many generations adopted a very reasonable plan with regard to the gifts she devoted to the Raynhams. As a family they were extremely prolific, so with regard to them she had certainly said to herself, “There is not enough beauty at my disposal to go round. What shall I do about them? Shall I divide all the beauty which I feel justified in investing in each generation, among all the children, or shall I endow one of them with it all, and leave the rest to look after themselves?”

  She had adopted the latter and most sensible alternative, and now for six or seven generations of Raynhams one of the many children had always been endowed with extraordinary beauty, while the others had to be content with a certain air of distinction and pleasantness which, after all, made their plainness of feature a matter of small account. Sometimes Nature had made an error of judgment, as anyone seeing the family portraits mus
t feel, in investing the beauty of a generation in a boy instead of a girl; but in this instance she had made no such mistake, and here in the window, waiting for her brother, was the bank in which the physical fortunes of the family were, for this generation, invested. Like them all, Maud was tall, and charm in her had not been sacrificed to perfection of feature. For violet eyes, rare in themselves, are so often no more than violet eyes, just pieces of exquisite colour. But here the myriad moods of the girl’s mind that chased each other like cloud and shadow on some windy day of spring across dark seas, lit wonderful lights in those violet pools, or made them dark as sapphires at night, and through these beautiful windows of her soul a beautiful soul looked forth. Humour and an alert sense of the ludicrous, so valuable as weapons in that arsenal of the mind from the stores of which we have ever to be arming ourselves against the assaults of tiresome and aggressive circumstance, gleamed there, ready to set the mouth smiling; eager and kindly interest in the spectacle of life was there, like a friendly face in the theatre; and deep down in those eyes you would say that something not yet awake or aware of itself slept and perhaps dreamed in its slumber of twenty years. And a man might find his breath catch in his throat at the thought of awakening it.

  Being a Raynham, she was very fair of complexion, but her hair was not of that vague straw colour which loosely passes for gold, provided only that the skin is white and pink, but of that tint which has been touched and proved by assay to be of the veritable metal. It grew low on her forehead and abundantly, but not in those excessive quantities that instantly call to the mind of the observer those ladies who stand all day with their backs to the windows of populous thoroughfares in order to display the riotous excess of capillary covering which the use of some advertised unguent results in. Nor did her mouth ever so faintly resemble the “Cupid’s bow” which is so dear to the fashion-plates of feminine loveliness. It was not like a bow at all; it was rather large, rather full-lipped, but, like her eyes, or like aspen-leaves in spring, it was ever a-quiver to the breeze of the moment, instinctively obeying the kindly mind that prompted it. Nor were her lips vermilion — a hue that Nature happily does not employ in the colouring of the human mouth, leaving its employment to art — but they were of that veiled blood-tint, blood below something like oiled silk, that speaks of youth and vitality as surely as vermilion speaks of the desire to be vital and young.

  The window faced north-west, and the rays of the sun, near its setting, poured full onto her, so that she half closed her eyes as she looked out across the golden haze of its level beams, while the breeze from the open sash just stirred her hair. The lawn, so pleasant to walk on, that carpet of grass woven with moss, and so impossible to use for the desecrating games which in England demand that a lawn be hard and flat, lay below the windows, enclosed in a riband of flower-bed, brilliant with the strong colours that distinguish the North and the South from the more temperate zone. Beyond ran a wall of grey stone, some four feet high, where tropæolum was rampant, but outside the untamed moor broke against it, as against a sea-wall, so that, going out from the garden-gate, set in the middle of it, one foot might still be on the soft tameness of the lawn, while the other was on the primeval heather. Just these few acres of garden and land for the house had been captured and tamed out of the moorland, while outside and all round, ragged and prehistoric as the ocean, there flowed, like the sea round some sand castle erected by children playing on the shore, the hills and heather of Caithness, tossing and tumbling there, as they had tumbled and tossed before ever the foot of man had set his tread on this waste land. Stone Age and what-not had gone to their making, and in so short time again — reckoning as the stones and the vegetable life of these transitory things number the years — these little puny efforts of man, the lawns and the terraces, would be swallowed up again, and smothered in the effervescence and fever of the world. Even now, how the infinitesimal microbe of disease was prevailing against the fragile life of the poor bewildered peasants in the village set down there in a wrinkle of the hill, invisible itself, but over which hung the blue smoke of the fires kindled at sunset!

  These thoughts were of sombre texture, and Maud, through whose head they were passing unbidden, like scenes involuntarily presented, never consciously allowed herself indulgence in sombre thought, unless from the shadows she expected the birth of something bright. Yet even after she had acknowledged the sombreness and inutility of it, she let her mind dwell on it all a little longer, searching, though vaguely, for some bracing counterblast. Of course, God was over all: she knew that quite well, and actively believed it. But when a plague like this, caused, no doubt, by the carelessness and uncleanliness of man, was snapping off lives like dried stalks, she would have liked to be able to think of some image that reconciled the beneficence of God with these hideous phenomena. It was impossible to see what ultimate good could come of letting people die like this. If from it all came some sign, some signal evidence of Divine power, it would be intelligible, or at least salutary. As it was, they died; the place was stricken.

  Then the instinct of youth, of health, of exuberant vitality, came to her aid, and she dismissed these questionings altogether. For her instinct told her, though the thought did not quite reach the coherence of definite words, how paralysing to oneself, and how infectious as regards others, is the indulgence of all dispiriting and depressing thought. Its microbes were as truly existent in the emotional and spiritual world as were the fever bacilli in Achnaleesh. But equally existent and even more potent and infectious were the sun-loving germs of confidence and the cheerful outlook. Already had she proved the truth of that in connection with Thurso, who had come home about this hour last night in a state of the blackest gloom and despair over the plight of this village of fever-stricken homes, but whose deadly depression had been quickly dispersed by her steady optimism. Thurso was naturally of extremely impressionable and imaginative mind, and the day, spent, as it had been, in going from house to house, finding everywhere the apparatus of illness, or the simpler and grimmer apparatus of death, had been like some hideous and real nightmare to him. Then, too, he tortured himself with a hundred unfounded suppositions. The epidemic seemed to him, though how he knew not, to be primarily his fault. Clearly, if everything — drains, water-supply, sanitary arrangements — had all been in perfect order, typhoid could not have come. The people were his tenants; it was his business to make sure that the conditions under which they lived were absolutely healthy.

  Now Thurso, as a matter of fact, was the most conscientious and careful of landlords, and these suppositions, though they had seemed hideously real to him yesterday evening, were but morbid creations of his brain, and on them Maud, with her cheerfulness and serenity of spirit, had acted like a charm. She knew well that he had in no detail been neglectful or culpable, and that being certain, she had set herself, not directly to combat his doubts and questionings, but to turn his attention resolutely away from them, just as a wise nurse will direct a patient’s attention to some interest alien to his pain, and not, by attempting to prove that pain is only an impression conceived by the brain, let his mind dwell on it. She had said to herself, “Darling old Thurso is terribly depressed. So I must distract his mind by being foolish.”

  So foolish she had been, but yet with art, so that it did not occur to him that she was playing the part of a nurse. And as when David played before Saul to exorcise the evil spirit, so she had played till for the time he forgot his troubles, both real and imaginary, in the charm and gaiety which, though she made deliberate use of them, were yet natural to her.

  To-night, however, the obsession of his fears and despondency seemed to have descended on and infected her, and it needed a long and conscious effort to rid herself of them. For — this might be unreasonable too — she knew at the back of her mind she was very anxious about him. Terrible as the epidemic was, it was producing a disproportionate effect on him; he was taking it too hard and far too self-consciously. From her intimate knowledge of him, and
from that instinct which common blood possesses, which can enable a sister to know precisely what a brother is feeling, though to a wife even the knowledge would be vague, she felt that he was strung up almost to breaking-point. But she knew also, with a glow of secret pride in his courage, that nobody but she would have guessed that, unless, perhaps, some skilled observer of nervous symptoms. That from childhood had been the danger of his constitution: he was balanced on so fine an edge, ready to topple over into the gulfs of black despondency; but, with the courage of high breeding, he ever concealed his private hell from the world, turning a brave and tranquil aspect to it, even though he must wear a mask. But for her he wore none, and she often saw his inward torture, when others knew only of a pleasant, courteous man — not gay, but of a manner that denoted quiet enjoyment of the world and habitual serenity.