Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Dora left her mother-in-law that morning with a sense of humility, a sense also of disgust at herself for her own stupidity. All these months a thing as beautiful as this great love and tenderness had been in front of her eyes, and she had not troubled to look at it with enough attention to recognize that there was beauty there. But now the tears that dimmed her own eyes quickened her vision. At last she saw the picture in its true value, and it made her ashamed. Was she equally blind, too, with regard to Claude? Was there something in him, some great thing which mattered so much that all which for months had got on her nerves more and more every day was, if seen truly, as trivial as she now saw were those things that had blinded her in the case of Lady Osborne? It might be so; all she knew was that if it was there, she had not troubled to look for it. At first she had so loved his beauty that nothing else mattered; nor did it seem to her possible that love could ever be diminished or suffer eclipse. But that had happened, even before she had borne a child to him; and to take its place (and more than take its place) there had sprung up no herbs of more fragrant beauty than the scarlet of that first flower. She had nothing in her garden for him but herbs of bitterness and resentment. That, at least, was all she knew of till now.

  She paused a moment outside the door of the sitting room where she had left him, before entering, for she knew his devotion to his mother, and was sorry for him. And somehow she felt herself unable to believe that Lady Osborne’s optimistic forecast would be justified; she did not think that in a few hours they would be all laughing over her imaginary ailment. And Claude must see that she was anxious; it would be better to confess to that, and prepare him for the possibility of there being something serious in store.

  He looked up quickly as she came in, throwing away the cigarette he had only just begun.

  “Well?” he said.

  Dora heard the tremble and trouble in that one word, and she was sorry for him. That particular emotion she had never felt for him before; she had never seen him except compassed about with serene prosperity.

  “Claude, I’m afraid she is ill,” she said. “She feels it herself too. She has been in great pain.” —

  “But how long has it been going on?” he asked. “Why hasn’t she seen a doctor?”

  “Because she didn’t want to spoil things for us. She thought she could hold on. But she is going now, to-day.”

  “What does she think it is?” asked he.

  “She wouldn’t talk of it at all,” said Dora. “I think she could hardly think of it, because she was thinking of Dad so much. She won’t come down to Grote, you see, but stop up here, unless she is told it is nothing. And so we must do our best that he shan’t be anxious or unhappy until we know whether there is real cause or not. She wants me particularly to go down there, or of course I would stop with her.”

  “The mater must feel pretty bad if she’s not coming to Grote,” said he.

  “Yes, I am afraid she does. Oh, Claude, I am so sorry for her, and you all. Her bravery has made us all blind. I ought to have seen long ago. I reproach myself bitterly.”

  “No, no, there’s no cause for that,” said he gently. “She’s taken us all in, and it’s just like her. Besides, who knows? it may be nothing in the least serious.”

  “I know that,” said she, “and we won’t be anxious before we have cause. Go and see her, dear, before we start, and make very light of it; just say you are glad she is being sensible at last, in going to be put right. There is no cause for anxiety yet. I shall go round to Sir Henry’s and arrange an appointment for her this afternoon, if possible, and get him to write to us very fully this evening, so that we shall know to-morrow. And then, if we are to get down by lunch, it will be time for us to start. I ordered the motor for twelve.”

  Lord Osborne was a good deal perturbed at the news with which Dora met him at Grote, and it was an affair that demanded careful handling to induce him not to go back at once to town and see her.

  “Bless me! Maria not well enough to come down, and you expect me to take my Sunday off, and eat my dinner as if my old lady was a-seated opposite me?” he asked. “Not I, my dear; Maria’s and my place is together, wherever that place may be.”

  “But you can’t go against her wish, Dad,” said Dora. “And what’s to become of me if you do? I’ve been sent down on purpose to play at being her. You’ve got to have a glass of milk by your bed, and a couple of biscuits. Oh, I know all about it!”

  “To think of your knowing that!” he said, rather struck by this detail.

  “Yes, but only this morning did I know it,” said Dora. “I sat with her a long time, and all she could think about was that you should be comfortable down here.”

  “Well, it goes against the grain not to be with her,” said he. “But, as you say, there’s no cause to be alarmed yet. And Sir Henry’s going to see her this afternoon?”

  “Yes, and telegraph to me afterward. Dad, if you upset all our beautiful arrangements, neither she nor I will ever speak to you again. Oh! do be good.”

  “But it won’t be like home not to have Lady O. here,” said he.

  “She knows that; but Claude and I have to make as good an imitation as we can. And you’ll put me in a dreadful hole if you go back to town. She will say I have made no hand of looking after you at all. I shall be in disgrace, as well as you.”

  “Well, God bless you, my dear!” said he, “and thank you for being so good to us. Here I’ll stop, if it’s the missus’s wish. No, I don’t fancy any pudding to-day, thank you.”

  Dora laid down her spoon and fork.

  “Dad, not one morsel do I eat unless you have some!” she said. “And I’m dreadfully hungry.”

  Lord Osborne laughed within himself.

  “Eh! you’ve got a managing wife, Claude,” he said. “She twists us all round her little finger.”

  The expected telegram arrived in the course of the evening, and though it contained nothing definite, Lord Osborne was able to interpret it in the most optimistic manner.

  “Well, Sir Henry tells you that Mrs. O.’s in no pain, and that he’s going to see her again to-morrow,” he said. “Why, I call that good news, and it relieves my mind, my dear. Bless her! she’ll get a good night’s rest, I hope now, and feel a different creature in the morning. There’s nothing else occurs to you, my dear? Surely he would have said if he had found anything really wrong?”

  Dora read the telegram again.

  “No; I think you are quite right to put that interpretation on it,” she said truthfully enough. “We’ll hope to get good news again to-morrow. I am glad she is out of pain.”

  But secretly she feared something she did not say — namely, that there was something wrong, but that Sir Henry had not been able without further examination to say what it was. Yet, after all, that interpretation might be only imagination on her part. But there was nothing in the telegram which appeared to her to be meant to allay the anxiety which he must know existed.

  Dora went to bed that evening with a great many things to think about, which had to be faced, not shirked or put aside. The day, which by the measure of events had been almost without incident, seemed terribly full of meaning to her. Lady Osborne had seen a doctor; she had talked over domestic affairs with Dora... that was not quite all: Claude had thought that a cheque had been forged, but found on examination that he had made a mistake. Set out like that, there seemed little here that could occupy her thoughts at all, still less that could keep away from her the sleep that in general was so punctual a visitor to her. But to-night it did not come near her, and she did not even try to woo its approach. She had no thought of sleep, though she was glad to have the darkness and the silence round her so that she might think without distraction. All these things, trivial as events, seemed to her to be significant, to hold possibilities, potentialities, altogether disproportionate to their face value. It might prove not to be so when she examined them; it might be that for some reason a kind of nightmare inflation was going on in her mind,
so that, as in physical nightmare things swell to gigantic shape, in her imagination these simple little things were puffed to grotesque and terrifying magnitude. She had to think them over calmly and carefully; it might easily be that they would sink to normal size again. —

  She took first that affair of the cheque, which had turned out, apparently, to be no affair at all. Claude had made a mistake, so he had himself said, and the cheque which he and the bank had suspected was perfectly genuine. But Dora, between the time of his thinking there was something wrong and of his ascertaining that there was not, had passed a very terrible quarter of an hour — one that it made her feel sick to think of even now. There was no use in blinking it; she had feared that Jim had forged her husband’s cheque. She had hardly given a thought to what the consequences might be; what turned her white and cold was the thought that he had done it. Her pen had spluttered when the thought first occurred to her, but she believed Claude had not noticed that. But had he noticed the sob of relief in her voice when he told her that the cheque was all right? He was not slow to observe, his perceptions, especially where she was concerned, were remarkably vivid, and it seemed to her that he must have noticed it. Yet he had said nothing.

  Anyhow the cheque was correct, and she was left with the fact that it had seemed to her possible that Jim had been guilty of this gross meanness. And, just as if the thing had been true, she found herself trying to excuse him, saw herself pleading with Claude for him.

  Poor Jim was not... was not quite like other people: he did not seem to know right from wrong. He had always cheated at games; she remembered telling Claude so one day down here at Grote, when he and Jim had been playing croquet and Jim had cheated. But they had not been playing for money. So Claude had told her. And he had told her the cheque was all right. That was all: there was nothing more to be thought of with regard to this.

  Yet she still lingered on the threshold of the thought of it. Jim had got “cleaned out” (his own phrase) in the Derby week, had pledged the quarter’s rent of Grote in advance to pay his Derby debts. And somebody had told her that Jim had lost heavily at Newmarket afterward, and he had told her that he had paid and was upright before the world in the matter of debts of honour.

  She had passed the threshold of that thought and was inside again. Where had he got the money from? Well, anyhow, not by forgery. Claude had said that the mistake was his. But how odd that he should not have been able to recollect about a cheque fur five hundred pounds, drawn only ten days before!

  Dora still lingered in the precincts of that thought, though she beckoned, so to speak, another thought to distract her. What a wonderful thing, how triumphant and beautiful was the love of which she had seen a glimpse to-day! It was all the more wonderful because it seemed to be common, to be concerned with biscuits and coffee. A hundred times she had seen Lady Osborne wrapped up in such infinitesimal cares as these, and had thought only that her mind and her soul were altogether concerned with serving, that the provision for the comfortable house and the good dinner was aspiration sufficient for her spiritual capacity. Yet there had always been a little more than that: there had been the moment in church when the sermon was to her taste, and the hymn a favourite, and she and her husband had tunelessly sung out of one book. That had touched Dora a little, but she had then dismissed it as a banal affair of goody-goody combined with a melodious tune, when she saw the great lunch that they both ate immediately afterward.

  But now these details, these Martha-cares had taken a different value. This morning Lady Osborne had been in great pain, had broken down in her endeavour to carry on somehow, and was face to face with a medical interview which she dreaded. But still she could think with meticulous care of her husband’s milk, of his slippers, of his tendency toward strong coffee. What if below the Martha was Mary, if it was Mary’s love that made Martha so sedulous in serving?

  All that she had overlooked, not caring to see below a surface which she said was commonplace and prosperous. The surface was transparent enough, too: it was not opaque. She could have seen down into the depths at any time if she had taken the trouble to look.

  Before her marriage and for a few months after it, she had thought she knew what “depths” meant. She thought she knew what it was to be absorbed in another. Then had come her disillusionment. She had worshipped surface only: she knew no more of Claude than that. She had loved his beauty, she had got accustomed to it. She had at first disregarded what she had grown to call his vulgarity, and had not got accustomed to it. She had known he was honest and true and safe, but she had grown to take all that for granted. She had never studied him, looked for what was himself, she had had few glimpses of him, no more than she had had of his mother. But to-day she felt that with regard to her these glimpses were fused together: they made a view, a prospect of a very beautiful country. But as yet there had no fusing like that come with regard to her husband. Now that she “saw,” even the country, the country of the gray-business was beautiful. And at present in her own warm country, her young country, beauty was lacking.

  Perhaps — here the third subject came in — perhaps even in the trouble that she felt threatened them, there were elements that might be alchemized. She was willing, at least, to attempt to find gold, to transform what she had thought was common into the fine metal. Some alchemy of the sort had already taken place before her eyes; she no longer thought common those little pathetic anxieties which she had heard this morning. For days and months the same anxieties, the same care had been manifest. There was no day, no hour in which Lady Osborne had not been concerned with the material comfort of those whom she loved. She was always wondering if her husband had got his lunch at the House, and what they gave him; whether the motor had got there in time, and if he remembered to put his coat on. Nor had her care embraced him alone. One day she had come up to Dora’s sitting room and found that there was a draught round the door, and so had changed her seat. But next day there was a screen placed correctly. Or Claude had sneezed at dinner, and a mysterious phial had appeared on his dressing table with the legend that directed its administration. He had come in to Dora to ask if she had any explanation of the bottle. But she had none and they concluded Mrs. Osborne had put it there, fussily no doubt, for a sneeze was only a sneeze, but with what loving intent. She remembered everything of that sort. Per liked kidneys: his wife liked cocoa. It was all attended to. Martha was in evidence. But Mary was there.

  Dora’s thoughts had strayed again. She had meant to think about the trouble that she felt was threatening, and to see if by some alchemy it might be transformed into a healing of hurt. She did not believe that she was fanciful in expecting bad news: she wished to contemplate the effect of it, if it came. Supposing Lady Osborne was found to be suffering from something serious, how was she herself to behave? She had to make things easier for her father-in-law: she had to be of some use. That was not so difficult: a little affection meant so much to him. He glowed with pleasure when she was kind. But for Claude? That was more difficult. She had to be all to him. It was much harder there to meet the needs she ought to meet, and should instinctively meet without thought. Once, if she had said, “Oh, Claude,” all would have been said because the simple words were a symbol. But now she could not say, “Oh, Claude” like that. She could be Martha, that was easy. But it was not Martha who was wanted.

  The door from his dressing room opened, and he came in, shielding with his hand the light of his candle, so that is should not fall on her face. The outline of his fingers even to her half-shut eyes was drawn in luminous red, where the light shone through the flesh. He had often come in like that, fearing to awaken her. Often she had been awake, as she was now.

  To-night she feigned sleep. And she heard the soft breath that quenched the candle; she heard a whisper of voice close to her, words of one who thought that none heard.

  “Good night, my darling,” he said.

  CHAPTER XI.

  JIM had been engaged to spend this week-end with a pa
rty, of which it is sufficient to say that though it would probably be amusing, it would not appear in the columns of the Morning Post. But on the Saturday afternoon he sent an excuse and remained in town instead. Much as he hated solitude, he had got something to do which made solitude a necessary evil. He had got to sit down and think, and continue thinking till he had made up his mind. He had to adopt a certain course of action, or by not acting at all commit himself to another course.

  Claude had not come back into the room after sending that message by the telephone, and calling to him the farewell he had been unable to answer. A few seconds before only, when he himself had come into the room and found Claude examining the counterfoils of his cheque-book, he had thought that all was over, and had Claude said nothing to him, just looked at him, and pointed with a finger to the blank counterfoil close to the end of the book, Jim would have confessed. But Claude had spoken at once those incredible words, and the moment after had confirmed the reality of them by the message to his bank. The immensity of that relief had taken away Jim’s power of speech; had he tried to use his voice he must have screamed. Then he heard the door of the flat shut, and the next moment he was rolling on the sofa, his face buried in its cushions, to stifle his hysterical laughter.

  The incredible had happened; the impossible was now part of the sober history of the month. The bank had called in question the cheque; evidently Claude had come down here to see whether he had drawn a cheque of corresponding date, had found a blank counterfoil (not the first in the book), and had accepted that as evidence that the cheque was of his own drawing. The possibility of a forgery never apparently occurred to him. His vaunted carelessness about money matters was strikingly exemplified; he had not exaggerated it in the least. What a blessed decree of Providence that one’s brother-in-law shall be so rich and such an idiot! Jim felt almost satisfied with the world.