A week later, Dodo was interviewing Dr. Cardew in her sitting-room at
Meering. He had just spoken at some little length to her, and she had
time to notice that he looked like a third-rate actor, and recorded the
fact also that Edith seemed to have gone back to scales and the
double-bass. This impression was conveyed from next door. He spoke like
an actor, too, and said things several times over, as if it was a play.
He talked about fractures and conjunctions, and X-ray photographs, and
satisfaction, and the recuperative powers of youth and satisfaction and
X-rays. Eventually Dodo could stand this harangue no longer.
"It is all too wonderful," she said, "and I quite see that if science
hadn't made so many discoveries, we couldn't tell if Hughie would have a
Bath-chair till doomsday or not. But now, Dr. Cardew, he is longing to
hear, and dreading to hear, poor lamb, and won't you let me be the
butcher, or I suppose I should say, 'Mary'? You've been such a clever
butcher, if you understand, and I do want to be Mary, who had a little
lamb"--she added in desperation, lest he should never understand her
allusive conversation. "Of course he's not my little lamb, but my
daughter's, and he wants to know so frightfully. Yes: I understand
about his intellect, too. It seems to me as bright as it ever was, and I
notice no change whatever. He always spoke as if he was excited. May I
go?"
Dodo intended to go, whether she might or not, but just at the door, she
seemed to herself to have treated this distinguished physician with some
abruptness. She unwillingly paused.
"Do stop to lunch," she said, "it will be lunch in ten minutes, and you
will find me not so completely distracted. I shall be quite sensible,
and would you ring the bell and tell them you are stopping? Don't mind
the scales and the double-bass, dear Dr. Cardew; it is only Mrs.
Arbuthnot, of whom you have heard. She will not play at lunch. I know
you think you have come to a mad-house, but we are all quite sane. And I
may go and tell Hughie what you have told me? If you hear loud screams
of joy, it will only be me, and you needn't take any notice."
Dodo slid along the passage, upset a chair in Nurse Bryerley's room, and
knelt down on the floor by Hugh's bed. She clawed at something with her
eager hands, and it was chiefly bed-clothes.
"Oh, praise God, Hughie," she said. "Amen. There! Now you know, and
there won't be any crutches, my dear, or the shadow of a Bath-chair,
whatever that is like. You won't have chicken-broth, and a foolish
nurse; not you, dear Nurse Bryerley, I didn't mean you, and you will
walk again and run again, and play the fool, just like me, for a hundred
years more. I told Dr. Cardew you weren't ever very calm or unexcited,
and your poor broken hip has mended itself, and your kidneys aren't
mixed up with your liver and lights, and you've--you've got your strong
young body back again, and your silly young brain. Oh, Hughie!"
Dodo leaned forward and clutched a more satisfactory handful of Hugh's
shoulders.
"I couldn't let anybody but myself tell you," she said. "I had to tell
you. But nobody else knows. You can tell anybody else you want to tell."
Hugh was paying but the very slightest attention to Dodo.
"Telegraph-form," he said rather rudely to Nurse Bryerley.
Dodo loved this inattention to herself. There was nothing _banal_ about
it. He had no more thought of her than he would have had for a newspaper
that contained ecstatic tidings. He did not stroke or kiss or shake
hands with a mere newspaper that told him such great things.
"It's so funny not to have telegraph-forms handy," he said.
"I know, dear. They ought always to be in every room. But servants are
so forgetful. Talk to me until Nurse Bryerley gets one."
Hugh looked at her with shining eyes.
"How can I talk?" he said. "There's nothing to say. I want that
telegraph-form."
Dodo, human and practical and explosive, yearned for the statement of
what she knew.
"Whom are you going to telegraph to?" she asked.
Hugh had time for one contemptuous glance at her.
"Oh, Aunt Dodo, you ass!" he said. "Oh, by Jove, how awfully rude of me,
and I haven't thanked you for coming to tell me. Thanks so much: I am so
grateful to you for all your goodness to me--ah!"
He took a telegraph-form and scribbled a few words.
"May it go now?" he said.
Dodo was almost embarrassingly communicative at lunch, at which meal
Edith did not appear, and the continued booming of the double-bass
indicated that Art was being particularly long that morning.
Consequently Dodo found herself alone with an astonished physician.
"If only a man could be a clergyman and a doctor," she said, "you could
tell him everything, because clergy know all about the soul and doctors
all about the body, and when you completely understand anything, you
can't be shocked at it. I think I should have poisoned you, Dr. Cardew,
if you had said that Hughie would never be the same man again: anyhow I
shouldn't have asked you to lunch. Ah, in that case I couldn't have
poisoned you! How difficult it must be to plan a crime really
satisfactorily. I always have had a great deal of sympathy with
criminals, because my great-grandfather was hanged for smuggling. Do
have some more mutton, which calls itself lamb. I certainly shall. I'm
going to have a baby, you know, or perhaps you didn't. Isn't it
ridiculous at my age, and he's going to be called David."
"In case--" began Dr. Cardew.
"No, in any case," said Dodo. "I mean it certainly is going to be a
boy. You shall see. What a day for January, is it not? The year has
turned, though I hope that doesn't mean it will go bad. I wish you had
seen Hughie's face when I told him he wasn't going to have a Bath-chair.
He looked like one of Sir Joshua Reynolds' angels with a three weeks'
beard, which I shouldn't wonder if he was shaving now, since, as I said,
there aren't going to be any Bath-chairs."
"I don't quite follow," said Dr. Cardew politely but desperately.
"I'm sure I don't wonder," said Dodo cordially, "although it's so clear
to me. But you see, he's going to propose to my daughter now that it's
certain he will be the same man again and not a different one, and no
eligible young man ever has a beard. What a good title for a sordid and
tragic romance 'Beards and Bath-chairs' would be. Of course Hughie
instantly called for a telegraph-form, and when I asked him who he was
telegraphing to, he called me an ass, in so many words, or rather so
few. After all I had done for him, too! Oh, here's Edith; Dr. Cardew and
I have not been listening to your playing, but we're sure it has been
lovely. Do you know Dr. Cardew? And it's Mrs. Arbuthnot, or ought I to
say 'she's Mrs. Arbuthnot'? Edith, if you don't mind our smoking, Dr.
Cardew and I will wait and talk to you for a little, but if you do, we
won't."
Edith shook hands so warmly with the doctor, that he felt he must have
been an old friend of hers, and that the fact had eluded his memory. But
it was only the general zeal which a long musical morning gave her.
"I'm sure you came to see our poor Hugh," she said. "Do tell me, is
there the slightest chance of his ever walking again?"
"Not the smallest," said Dodo; "I've just been to break the news to him,
and he has telegraphed to Nadine to come at once--I can't keep it up.
Edith, he is going to be perfectly well again, and he has telegraphed to
Nadine just the same."
Edith looked a little disappointed.
"Then I suppose we must resign ourselves to a perfectly conventional and
Philistine ending," she said. "There was all the makings of a twentieth
century tragedy about the situation, and now I am afraid it is going to
tail off and be domestic and happy and utterly inartistic. I had better
hopes for Nadine, she always looked as if there might be some wild
destiny in store for her, and when she engaged herself to Seymour
without caring two straws for him, I thought I heard a great fate
knocking at the door--"
This was too gross an inconsistency for even Dodo to pass over.
"And you said at the time you thought the engagement was horrible and
unnatural and me a wicked mother for permitting it," she cried.
"Very possibly. No doubt then I was being a woman, now I am talking as
an artist. You always confuse the two, Dodo, for all your general
acumen. When I have been playing all morning--"
"Scales," said Dodo.
"A great deal of the finest music in the world is based on scale
passages, and the second movement of my symphony is based on them too.
When I have been playing all morning, I see things as an artist. I know
Dr. Cardew will agree with me: sometimes he sees things as a surgeon,
sometimes as a man. As a surgeon if a hazardous operation is in front of
him, he says to himself, 'This is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and
it thrills me.' As a man he says, 'Poor devil, I am afraid he may die
under the knife.' As for you, Dodo, artistically speaking, you spoiled a
situation as--lurid as a play by Webster. 'Princess Waldenech' might
have been as classical in real life as the 'Duchess of Malfi.'
Artistically an atmosphere as stormy as the first act of the Valkyries
surrounded you. And now instead of the '_Götterdämmerung_' you are going
to give us '_Hänsel und Gretel_' with flights of angels."
Dodo exploded with laughter.
"And while I was still giving you 'Princess Waldenech'," she said, "you
cut me for a year."
"As a woman," cried Edith; "as an artist I adored you. You were as
ominous as Faust's black poodle. Of course your first marriage to a man
who adored you, for whom you did not care one bar of the 'Hallelujah
chorus,' was a thing that might have happened to anybody; but when, as
soon as he was mercifully delivered, you got engaged to Jack, and at the
last moment jilted him for that melodramatic drunkard, I thought great
things were going to happen. Then you divorced him, and I waited with a
beating heart. And now, would you believe it, Dr. Cardew!" cried Edith,
pointing a carving fork with a slice of ham on the end of it at him.
"She has married Lord Chesterford, as you know, and is going to have a
baby. And all that wealth of potential tragedy is going to end in a
silver christening-mug. The silly suffragette with her hammer and a
plate-glass window has more sense of drama than you, Dodo. And now
Nadine is going to take after you, and marry the man she loves. Hugh is
just as bad: instead of dying for the sake of that blear-eyed child who
comes up to enquire after him every day, he is going to live for the
sake of Nadine. Drama is dead. Of course it has long been dead in
literature, but I hoped it survived in life."
Dodo turned anxiously to Dr. Cardew.
"She isn't mad," she said reassuringly. "You needn't be the least
frightened. She will play golf immediately after lunch."
Edith had been brought her large German pewter beer-mug, and for the
moment she had put her face into it, like old-fashioned gentlemen
praying into their hats on Sunday morning before service. There was a
little froth on the end of her rather long nose when she took it out.
"Why not?" she said. "All artistic activity is a sort of celestial
disease, and its antidote is bodily activity which is a material
disease. A perfectly healthy body, like mine, does not need exercise,
except in order to bring down the temperature of the celestial fever.
When I am playing golf, my artistic soul goes to sleep and rests. And
when I am composing, I should not know a golf-ball from an egg. That is
me. You might think I am being egoistic, but I only take myself as an
instance of a type. I speak for the whole corporate body of artists."
"Militant here on earth," remarked Dodo.
"Militant? Of course all artists are militant, and they fight against
blind eyes and deaf ears. They scream and lighten, and hope to shake
this dull world into perception. But it is fighting against prodigious
odds. The drama that seems to interest the world now is a presentation
of the hopeless lives of suburban people. Any note of romance or
distinction is sufficient to secure a failure. It's the same in music:
Debussy when he tells us of rain in the garden makes the rain fall into
a small backyard with sooty blighted plants growing in it, out of a
foggy sky. When he gives us '_reflets dans l'eau_' the water is a little
cement basin in the same backyard, with anemic goldfish swimming about
in it. As for Strauss, he began and finished with that terrible
'domestic symphony.' It went from the kitchen into the scullery, and
back again. Fiction is the same. Any book that deals with entirely dull
people, provided that they, none of them, ever show a spark of real fire
or are touched by romance or joy or beauty, makes success. They must
have the smell of oilcloth and Irish stew around them, and then the
world says, 'This is art' or 'This is reality.' There's the mistake! Art
is never real: it is fantasy, a fairy-story, a soap-bubble sailing into
the sunset. It is Art because it takes you out of reality. Of course
artists are militant; they fight against dullness, and they will fight
forever, and they will never win. As for their being militant here on
earth, you must be militant somewhere. I shall be militant in heaven by
and by. I wonder if you understand. As I said, I was disappointed in
Nadine artistically, but I am enraptured with her humanly. On that same
plane I am enraptured with you, Dodo. Humanly speaking, I have watched
you with sobs in my throat, battling perilously on the great seas. And
now you are like a battered ship, having weathered all storms, and
putting into port, with all the piers and quays shouting congratulation.
Artistically speaking, you are a derelict, and I should like to have you
blown up. Hullo, what has happened to Dr. Cardew?"
Dodo looked quickly round. The thought just crossed her mind that he
might be asleep or having a fit. But there was no Dr. Cardew there, nor
anywhere about, to be seen.
"He has gone away while we weren't attending, just as a conjurer changes
a rabbit to an omelette while you aren't attending," she said, "and I'm
sure I don't wonder. Oh, Edith, at last the 'Hunting of the Snark' has
come true. I see now that we are _Boojums_. People softly and silently
vanish away when you and I are talking, poor dears. They can't stand it,
and I've noticed it before. Dear old Chesterford used to vanish
sometimes like that, and I never knew until I saw he wasn't there. I'm
sure Bertie vanishes too sometimes. I suppose we ought to vanish also,
as the table must be laid again for dinner to-night."
Edith finished her beer.
"I had breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same cloth once," she said. "I
was composing all day, and at intervals things were stuck in front of me
while I ate or drank. I didn't move from nine in the morning till
half-past eight in the evening, and I wrote forty pages of full score,
and the inspiration never flagged for a moment. I wonder why artists are
so fond of writing what they call 'My Memories'; they ought to be
content, as I am, to stand or fall by what they have done. Thank God, I
have never had any doubts about my standing. Oh, I see a telegraph-boy
coming up the drive. It is sure to be for me. I am expecting a
quantity."
This particular one happened to be for Dodo. Edith was disposed to take
it as a personal insult.
* * * * *
Nadine during the days she had spent at Winston had not done much
looking after Papa Jack, which had been the face-reason of her going
there; and it is doubtful whether the real reason had found itself
fulfilled, since there was substituted for the strain of seeing Hugh
daily, the strain of wanting to see him. Dodo, with her own swift
recuperative powers, and the genius she had for being absorbed in her
immediate surroundings, had not reckoned with Nadine's inferior facility
in this respect, nor had she realized how completely the love which had
at last touched Nadine drained and dominated her whole nature. All her
zest for living, all her sensitiveness and intelligence seemed to have
been, as by some alchemical touch, transformed into the gold which, all
her life, had been missing from her. She explained this to Esther, who,
with an open-mindedness that might have appeared rather unsisterly,
ranged her sympathies in opposition to Seymour.
"How long I shall be able to stop here," she said, "I don't know. I
promised Mama I would go away for at least a week, unless Hughie wanted
me, but after that I think I shall go back whether he wants me or not. I
can't attend to anything else, and last night when I was playing
billiards I carefully put the chalk into my coffee, which is not at all
the sort of thing I usually do. It is very odd: all my life I have been
quite unaware of this one thing, now I am not really aware of anything
else. You are rather dream-like yourself to me: I am not quite sure if
you have really happened, or are part of a general background."
"I am not part of any background," said Esther firmly.
"No, so you say; but perhaps it is only the background that tells me so.
And I suppose I ought to think a great deal about Seymour. I try to do
that, but when I've thought about him for about a minute and a quarter,
I find my thoughts wander, and I wonder if Hughie has had his beef-tea
or not. I do hope that he is not unhappy, but having hoped it, I have
finished with that, and remember that just at this moment Hughie is
being made comfortable for the night. But do pin me down to Seymour.
Did you see him in town, and does he mean to tell me what he thinks?"
"Yes, I saw him. He was exceedingly cross, but I don't think his
crossness came from temper; it came from his mind's hurting him. He told
me he had meant to come down here and have it out with you, but
presently he said you weren't worth it. So I took your side."
"That was darling of you," said Nadine; "but I am not sure that Seymour
is not right."
"How can he be right? You haven't changed towards him."
"Oh, doesn't jilting him make a change?" asked Nadine hopefully.
"No, that is an accident, as I told him. You didn't do it on purpose.
You might as well say that to be knocked down by a motor-car is done on
purpose. You get knocked down by Hughie. You hadn't ever loved Seymour
at all, and really you said you would marry him largely because you
wanted Hughie to stop thinking about you. It was chiefly for Hughie's
sake you said you would marry Seymour, and it was so wonderful of you.
Then came another accident and Seymour fell in love with you. I warned
him when we were on the family improvement tour in the summer that he
was doing rather a risky thing--"
Nadine got up.
"Risky?" she said. "Oh, how risky it is. It is that which makes it so
splendid! You risk everything: you go for it blind. Do you think
Seymour went for it blind? I don't believe he did. I think he had one
eye open all the time. He couldn't be quite blind I think: his
intelligence would prevent it. And I don't think he would be cross now,
if he had been quite blind. So I am not properly sorry for him."
"I went to lunch with him," said Esther. "He ate an enormous lunch,
which I suppose is a consoling sign. But then Seymour would eat an
enormous breakfast on the morning he was going to be hung. He would feel
that he would never have any more breakfasts, so he would eat one that
would last forever. I think we have given enough time to Seymour. It is
much more important that you shouldn't think of me as a background."
Nadine apparently thought differently.
"But I want to be nice to Seymour," she said, "and I don't see how to
begin. And--and he's part of the background, too. He doesn't seem really
to matter. But if he was really fond of me, like that, it's hateful of
me not to care. But how can I care? I've tried to care every day, and
often twice a day, but--oh, a huge 'but.'"
The two were talking in Dodo's sitting-room, which Nadine had very
wisely appropriated. At this moment the door opened, and Seymour stood
there.
"I made up my mind not to come and see you," he said to Nadine, "and
then I changed it."
Esther sprang up.
"Oh, Seymour, how mean of you," she said, "not to ask Nadine if you
might come."
"Not at all. She was bound to see me. But I didn't come to see you. You
had better go away."
"If Nadine wishes--" she began.
"It does not matter what Nadine wishes. Nadine, please tell her to go."
Seymour spoke quite quietly, and having spoken he turned aside and lit a
cigarette he held in his hand. By the time he had finished doing that
the door had closed behind Esther. He looked round.
"What a charming room!" he said. "But if you are going to sit in a room
like this, you ought to dress for it."
Nadine felt that all the sorrow she had been conscious of for him was
being squeezed out of her. He tiptoed about, now looking at a picture,
and now fingering an embroidery. He stopped for a moment opposite a
Louis Seize tapestry chair, and gently flicked off it the cigarette ash
that he had let drop there. He looked at the faded crimson of the
Spanish silk on the walls, and examined with extreme care a Dutch
picture of a frozen canal with peasants skating, that hung above the
mantelpiece. There was an Aubonne carpet on the floor, and after one
glance at it he went softly off it, and stood on the hearth-rug.
"I should put three-quarters of this room into a museum," he said, "and
the rest into a dust-bin. You are going to ask me what I should put into
the dust-bin. I should put that sham Watteau picture there, and that
bureau that thinks it is Jacobean."
"And me?" asked Nadine.
"I am not sure. No: I am sure. I don't put you anywhere. I want to know
where you put yourself. Perhaps you think you don't owe me an
explanation. But I disagree with you. I think you owe it me. Of course I
know you haven't got an explanation. But I should like to hear your idea
of one."
Standing on the hearth-rug he pointed his toe as he spoke, looking at
the well-polished shoe that shod it. Nadine was just on the point of
telling him that he was thinking not about her, but about his shoe, but
he was too quick for her.
"Of course I'm thinking about my shoe," he said. "I was wondering how it
is that Antoinette polishes shoes better than any one in the world."
"Is that what you have come to talk about?" asked Nadine.
"That is a very foolish question, Nadine. You have quibbled and
chattered so incessantly that sometimes I think you can do nothing else.
You might retort with a _tu quoque_, but it would not be true. I was
capable anyhow of falling in love with you, I regret to say."
Seymour paused a moment, and then raised his eyes, which had been
steadily regarding the masterpieces of Antoinette, to Nadine.
"I am wrong: I don't regret it," he said.
Suddenly his sincerity and his reality reached and touched Nadine. He
stepped out of the background, so to speak, and stood firmly and
authentically beside her.
"I regret it very much," she said, "and I am as powerless to help you,
as I am to help myself."
"You seem to have been helping yourself pretty freely," said he in a
sudden exasperation. But she, usually so quick to flare into flame, felt
no particle of resentment.
"There is no good in saying that," she said.
"I did not mean there to be. Good? I did not come down here to do you
good."
"Why did you come? Just to reproach me?"
"Partly."
Again Seymour paused.
"I came chiefly in order to look at you," he said at length. "You are
quite as beautiful as ever, you may like to know."
It was as if a further light had been turned on him, making him clearer
and more real. She had confessed to Esther her inability to be "properly
sorry" for him, but now found herself not so incapable.
"I can't help either you or myself," she said again. "We have both been
taken in control by something outside ourselves, which never happened to
either of us before. You feel that I have behaved atrociously to you,
and any one you ask would agree with you. But the atrocity was
necessary. I couldn't help it. Only you must not think that I am not
sorry for the effect that such necessity has had on you. I regret it
very much. But if you ask me whether I am ashamed of myself, I answer
that I am not."
She went on with growing rapidity and animation.
"If you have been in love with me, Seymour," she said, "you will
understand that, for you will know that compulsion has been put upon me.
How was it any longer possible for me to marry you, when I fell in love
with Hughie? I jilted you: it is a word quite hideous, like flirt, but
just as never in my life did I flirt, so I have not jilted you in the
hideous sense. It was not because I was tired of you, or had a fancy for
some one else. There was no getting away from what happened. Hughie
enveloped me. My walls fell down, and went to Jericho. It wasn't my
fault. The trumpets blew, just that."
"And in walked Hugh," said Seymour.
"I am not sure about that," said Nadine. "I think he was there all the
time, walled up."
Seymour was silent a moment.
"How is he?" he asked.
"He is going on well. They do not know more than that yet. He is getting
over the concussion, but they cannot tell yet whether he will be able to
walk again."
"And are you going to marry him in any case, if he is a cripple, I
mean?" he asked.
"If Hughie will have me. I daresay I shall propose to him, and be
refused, just as used to happen the other way round in the old days. Oh,
I know what his soul is like so well! He will say that he will not let
me spend all my life looking after a cripple. But I shall have my way in
the end. I am much stronger than he."
Seymour saw and understood the change in her face when she spoke of
Hugh. Admirable as her beauty always was, he had not dreamed that such
tender transformation could come to it, or that it was capable of
assuming so inward-burning and devoted a quality and yet shining with
its habitual brilliance uneclipsed. The love which he had dreamed would
some day awake there for him, he saw now in the first splendor of its
dawning, and from it he could guess what would be the glory of its full
noonday, and with how celestial a ray she would shine on her lover. For
the moment it seemed to him not to matter that it was another, not he,
on whom that dawn should break, for whom it should grow to noonday, and
sink at last in the golden West of a life truly and lovingly lived
without fear of the lengthening shadows and the night that must
inevitably close as it had preceded it; for by the power of his own
love, he could detach himself from himself, and though only momently
reach that summit of devotion far below which, remote and insignificant,
lies the mere husk and shell of the world that spins through the
illimitable azure. So Dante saw the face of Beatrice, when he passed
into the sweetness of the Earthly Paradise, and there came to him she
whom the chariot with its harnessed griffins drew. And not otherwise, in
his degree and hers, Seymour looked now at Nadine's face, glorified and
made tender by her love, and in the perception that his own love gave
him, he hailed and adored it....
"I came to scold and reproach," he said, "but I also came just to see
you, to look at you. There is no harm in that. And if there is I can't
help it. Nadine, I used to wonder what you would look like when you
loved. You have shown me that. I--I didn't guess. There's a poem by
Browning which ends 'Those who win heaven, blest are they.' The man who
speaks was just in my case. But he managed to say that. I say it too,
very quickly, because I know this unnatural magnanimity won't last. I
agree with all you have said: it wasn't your fault. I hope you won't be
tied to a cripple all your life, or, if he has to be a cripple, I hope
you will be tied to him. There! I've said it, and it is true, but it
rather reminds me of holding my breath. Give me a kiss, please, and then
I'll climb swiftly down out of this rarefied atmosphere."
He kissed her on the mouth, as his right had been, and for a moment held
her to him in an embrace more intimate than he had ever yet claimed from
her. Edith, it may be remembered, had once seen him kiss her, and had
pronounced it an anemic salutation. But it was not anemic now: his blood
was alert and virile; its quality was not inferior to that which, one
day in the summer, made Hugh seize her wrists, demanding the annulment
of the profanation of her marriage with Seymour. In both, too, was the
same fierceness of farewell.
For a few seconds Seymour held her close to him, and felt her neither
shrink from him nor respond. Her willing surrender to his right was the
utmost she could give, and he knew there was nothing else for him.
And then he proceeded to descend from what he had called the rarefied
atmosphere with the speed of a yet-unopened parachute.
"Damn Hugh," he said. "Yes, damn him. For God's sake, don't tell him I
asked after him, or hoped he was getting better. I don't want him to
die, since I don't suppose that would do me any good, nor do I want him
to be crippled for life, since that also would be quite useless after
what you have told me. But if you said to him that I had asked after
him, I should sink into the earth for shame. He would think it noble and
nice of me, and I'm not noble or nice. I should hate to be thought
either. His good opinion of me would make me choke and retch. I should
not be able to sleep if I thought Hugh was thinking well of me. So hold
your tongue."
Nadine had never been able quite to keep pace with Seymour: she always
lagged a little behind, just as Hugh lagged so much more behind her. She
was still gasping from the violence of his seizure of her, when he had
descended, so to speak, a thousand feet or so. Tenderness still clung
about her like soaked raiment.
"Oh, Seymour," she said. "I didn't realize you felt like that: I didn't,
really. What are you going to do?"
His clever handsome face wore an uncompromising look, but there was
humor in his eyes.
"I may take to drink," he said, "like your angelic father. Very likely I
shan't, because I notice that it spoils your breakfast if you are
intoxicated the evening before. I shall certainly try to get some more
jade, and I shan't marry Antoinette, because she is buxom. If I marry, I
shall marry some girl who reminds me of asparagus, like you. Not the
stout French asparagus, of course, but the lean English variety. I
should not wonder if I came to your wedding, and wrote an account of it
to a ladies' newspaper. I shall say you were looking hideous. I haven't
got any other plans, except to go away from this place. You are a sort
of chucker-out, Nadine, at Winston. You chucked out Hugh in the summer,
and now in the winter you chuck me out. You are a vampire, I think. You
suck people dry, and then you throw them away like orange skins. Don't
argue with me: if you argued I should become rude. I was rude to Aunt
Dodo the other day, when she showed me you sleeping on the floor by
Hugh's bed. It was a sickening spectacle: I told her so at the time, and
I tell you so now."
Poor complicated Nadine! Her complications had been canceled like vulgar
fractions, and she was left in a state of the most deplorable
simplicity. There was a numerator, and that was Hugh; there was a nought
below and that was she. The simplest arithmetician could see that the
nought "went into" the numerator an infinite number of times. The
result was that there was Hugh and nothing else at all. Her surrendered
reply indicated this: it indicated also her knowledge of it.
"But it was Hughie there," she said.
And then suddenly Seymour's unexpanded parachute opened, and he floated
in liquid air, with the azure encompassing him.
"Your Hughie," he said.
"Mine," said Nadine.
There came an interruption. A footman entered with a telegram which he
gave to Nadine. And once again the ineffable light came into her face,
coming from below, transfiguring it.
"That's from the cripple," said Seymour unerringly.
She passed him the words Hugh had written that morning. They could not
have been simpler, nor could he, by any expenditure of separate
half-pennies have said more.
"Come back," he had written, "important. Good news."
Seymour got up.
"So you are going," he said.
Nadine did not seem to hear this. She addressed the footman.
"Tell them to send round the Napier car at once," she said.
"Yes, Miss. But his lordship ordered the Napier to meet the shooters--"
"Has it gone?"
"No, Miss: it was to pick up Lady Esther--"
"Then I want it at once, instead. I am going to start instantly. Tell
them to send the car round at once. And tell my maid to pack a bag for
me, and follow with the rest of my luggage."
"Yes, Miss. Where to, shall I say?"
"Meering, of course. She will go by train."
She turned her unclouded radiance to Seymour again, and held out both
her hands.
"Oh, Seymour," she said. "I feel such a brute, such a brute. But it's my
nature to."
"Clearly. Go and put on your hat."
"Will you let me hear of you sometimes?" she asked.
"I don't see why I should write to you, if you mean that," he said.
"Nor do I, now I come to think of it. I made a conventional observation.
Will you let them know if you want lunch, or want to be taken to the
station?"
"Yes. Thanks. Good-by. And good luck."
She lingered one moment more.
"Thank you," she said. "And don't think of me without remembering I am
sorry."
* * * * *
It was still an hour short of sunset when the car emerged from the
mountainous inland on to the coast. The plain and the line of sand-dunes
that bordered the sea slept under a haze of golden winter sun; a few
wisps of light cloud hung round the slopes of Snowdon, but otherwise the
sky was of pale unflecked blue, from rim to rim, and the sea was as
untroubled as the turquoise vault which it reflected. Though January had
still a half-dozen of days to run, a hint and promise of spring was in
the air, and Nadine sat in the open car unchilled by its headlong
passage. They had taken but five hours to come from the midlands, and
they seemed to have passed for her in one throb of eager consciousness,
so that she looked bewildered to find that the familiar landmarks of
home were close about her, and that they were already close to their
journey's end. Soon they began to climb out of the plain again up the
outlying flank of hill that formed the south end of the bay, and
culminated in the steep bluff of rock at the top of which she and Hugh
had sat and quarreled and been reconciled on the morning of the gale.
To-day no tumult of maddened water beat at the base of it, nor did
thunder of surges break into spray and flying foam, and the line of reef
that ran out from it lay, with its huge scattered rocks, as quiet as a
herd of sea-beasts grazing. As they got higher she could see over the
sand-dunes the beach itself; no ramparts and towers of surf or ruins of
shattered billows fringed it now; a child could have played on that zone
of shattering and resistless forces. Of its dangers and menaces nothing
was left; the great gift that it had brought to Nadine's heart alone
remained, and flowered there like the rose-pink almond blossom in
spring. Nature had healed where she had hurt, and what had seemed but a
blind and wanton stroke, had proved to be the smiting of the rock, so
that the spring burst forth, and rivers ran in the dry places.
The house, gray and welcoming, stood dozing in the afternoon sun, and
Nadine, suddenly conscious that they had arrived without a halt, said a
contrite word to the chauffeur on the subject of lunch. She recollected
also that she had sent no reply to Hugh's telegram, and that her arrival
would be unexpected. Unexpected it certainly was, and Dodo, who had just
seen Edith off to play golf better than anybody else had ever done,
jumped up with a scream as she entered.
"But, my darling, is it you?" she cried. "We have been expecting to hear
from you, but seeing is better than hearing. Oh, Nadine, such news! Of
course you guess it, so I shall not tell you, as it is unnecessary, and
besides Hughie must do that. He has been shaved, and looks quite clean
and young again. Will you go up to see him at once? Perhaps it is
equally unnecessary to ask that. Shall I come up with you? My darling,
there's a third unnecessary question. Of course I shall do nothing of
the kind. Ask the great grenadier if you may go in to him without his
being told you are coming. It might be rather a shock, but personally I
believe shocks of joy are always good for one. At least they have never
hurt me. Go upstairs, dear, and after an unreasonable time you might
ring for me."
The nurse's room was a dressing-room attached to the bedroom where Hugh
lay. Nadine went in through this, and the door into the room beyond
being open, she saw that Nurse Bryerley was in there. At this moment
she looked up and saw Nadine. She turned towards Hugh's bed.
"Here's a visitor for you," she said, and beckoned to Nadine to enter.
She heard Hugh ask "Who?" in a voice that sounded somehow expectant, and
she went in. In the doorway she passed Nurse Bryerley coming out, and
the door closed behind her.
Hugh had raised himself on his elbow in bed, and the light in his eyes
showed that, though he had asked who his visitor was, his heart knew. He
neither spoke nor moved while Nadine came across the room to his
bedside. Then in a whisper:
"It is Nadine," he said.
She knelt down by the bed.
"Yes, Hughie. You wanted me," she said.
"I always want you," he answered.
For a moment Nadine hid her face in her hands without replying. Then she
raised it again to him.
"Hughie, you have always got me," she said.
She drew that beloved head down to hers.
* * * * *
"And the news?" she said presently.
"Oh, that!" said Hugh. "It's only that I am going to get quite well and
strong again. That's all."