It was a morning of early March, and Michael, looking out from the
dining-room window at the house in Curzon Street, where he had just
breakfasted alone, was smitten with wonder and a secret ecstasy, for he
suddenly saw and felt that it was winter no longer, but that spring had
come. For the last week the skies had screamed with outrageous winds
and had been populous with flocks of sullen clouds that discharged
themselves in sleet and snowy rain, and half last night, for he had
slept very badly, he had heard the dashing of showers, as of wind-driven
spray, against the window-panes, and had listened to the fierce rattling
of the frames. Towards morning he had slept, and during those hours it
seemed that a new heaven and a new earth had come into being; vitally
and essentially the world was a different affair altogether.
At the back of the house on to which these windows looked was a garden
of some half acre, a square of somewhat sooty grass, bounded by high
walls, with a few trees at the further end. Into it, too, had the
message that thrilled through his bones penetrated, and this little
oasis of doubtful grass and blackened shrubs had a totally different
aspect to-day from that which it had worn all those weeks. The sparrows
that had sat with fluffed-up feathers in corners sheltered from the
gales, were suddenly busy and shrilly vocal, chirruping and dragging
about straws, and flying from limb to limb of the trees with twigs in
their beaks. For the first time he noticed that little verdant cabochons
of folded leaf had globed themselves on the lilac bushes below the
window, crocuses had budded, and in the garden beds had shot up the
pushing spikes of bulbs, while in the sooty grass he could see specks
and patches of vivid green, the first growth of the year.
He opened the window and strolled out. The whole taste and savour of the
air was changed, and borne on the primrose-coloured sunshine came the
smell of damp earth, no longer dead and reeking of the decay of autumn,
but redolent with some new element, something fertile and fecund,
something daintily, indefinably laden with the secret of life and
restoration. The grey, lumpy clouds were gone, and instead chariots of
dazzling white bowled along the infinite blue expanse, harnessed to the
southwest wind. But, above all, the sparrows dragged straws to and fro,
loudly chirruping. All spring was indexed there.
For a moment Michael was entranced with the exquisite moment, and stood
sunning his soul in spring. But then he felt the fetters of his own
individual winter heavy on him again, and he could only see what was
happening without feeling it. For that moment he had felt the leap in
his blood, but the next he was conscious again of the immense
fatigue that for weeks had been growing on him. The task which he had
voluntarily taken on himself had become no lighter with habit, the
incessant attendance on his mother and the strain of it got heavier day
by day. For some time now her childlike content in his presence had
been clouded and, instead, she was constantly depressed and constantly
querulous with him, finding fault with his words and his silences, and
in her confused and muffled manner blaming him and affixing sinister
motives to his most innocent actions. But she was still entirely
dependent on him, and if he left her for an hour or two, she would wait
in an agony of anxiety for his return, and when he came back overwhelmed
him with tearful caresses and the exaction of promises not to go away
again. Then, feeling certain of him once more, she would start again on
complaints and reproaches. Her doctor had warned him that it looked
as if some new phase of her illness was approaching, which might
necessitate the complete curtailment of her liberty; but day had
succeeded to day and she still remained in the same condition, neither
better nor worse, but making every moment a burden to Michael.
It had been necessary that Sylvia should discontinue her visits, for
some weeks ago Lady Ashbridge had suddenly taken a dislike to her, and,
when she came, would sit in silent and lofty displeasure, speaking to
her as little as possible, and treating her with a chilling and awful
politeness. Michael had enough influence with his mother to prevent her
telling the girl what her crime had been, which was her refusal to
marry him; but, when he was alone with his mother, he had to listen to
torrents of these complaints. Lady Ashbridge, with a wealth of language
that had lain dormant in her all her life, sarcastically supposed that
Miss Falbe was a princess in disguise (“very impenetrable disguise, for
I’m sure she reminds me of a barmaid more than a princess”), and thought
that such a marriage would be beneath her. Or, another time, she hinted
that Miss Falbe might be already married; indeed, this seemed a very
plausible explanation of her attitude. She desired, in fact, that Sylvia
should not come to see her any more, and now, when she did not, there
was scarcely a day in which Lady Ashbridge would not talk in a pointed
manner about pretended friends who leave you alone, and won’t even take
the trouble to take a two-penny ‘bus (if they are so poor as all that)
to come from Chelsea to Curzon Street.
Michael knew that his mother’s steps were getting nearer and nearer to
that border line which separates the sane from the insane, and with all
the wearing strain of the days as they passed, had but the one desire
in his heart, namely, to keep her on the right side for as long as was
humanly possible. But something might happen, some new symptom develop
which would make it impossible for her to go on living with him as she
did now, and the dread of that moment haunted his waking hours and his
dreams. Two months ago her doctor had told him that, for the sake of
everyone concerned, it was to be hoped that the progress of her disease
would be swift; but, for his part, Michael passionately disclaimed such
a wish. In spite of her constant complaints and strictures, she was
still possessed of her love for him, and, wearing though every day was,
he grudged the passing of the hours that brought her nearer to the awful
boundary line. Had a deed been presented to him for his signature, which
bound him indefinitely to his mother’s service, on the condition that
she got no worse, his pen would have spluttered with his eagerness to
sign.
In consequence of his mother’s dislike to Sylvia, Michael had hardly
seen her during this last month. Once, when owing to some small physical
disturbance, Lady Ashbridge had gone to bed early on a Sunday evening,
he had gone to one of the Falbes’ weekly parties, and had tried to fling
himself with enjoyment into the friendly welcoming atmosphere. But for
the present, he felt himself detached from it all, for this life with
his mother was close round him with a sort of nightmare obsession,
through which outside influence and desire could only faintly trickle.
He knew that the other life was there, he knew that in his heart he
longed for Sylvia as much as ever; but, in his present detachment, his
desire for her was a drowsy ache, a remote emptiness, and the veil that
lay over his mother seemed to lie over him also. Once, indeed, during
the evening, when he had played for her, the veil had lifted and for the
drowsy ache he had the sunlit, stabbing pang; but, as he left, the veil
dropped again, and he let himself into the big, mute house, sorry that
he had left it. In the same way, too, his music was in abeyance: he
could not concentrate himself or find it worth while to make the effort
to absorb himself in it, and he knew that short of that, there was
neither profit nor pleasure for him in his piano. Everything seemed
remote compared with the immediate foreground: there was a gap, a gulf
between it and all the rest of the world.
His father wrote to him from time to time, laying stress on the extreme
importance of all he was doing in the country, and giving no hint of his
coming up to town at present. But he faintly adumbrated the time when
in the natural course of events he would have to attend to his national
duties in the House of Lords, and wondered whether it would not (about
then) be good for his wife to have a change, and enjoy the country
when the weather became more propitious. Michael, with an excusable
unfilialness, did not answer these amazing epistles; but, having basked
in their unconscious humour, sent them on to Aunt Barbara. Weekly
reports were sent by Lady Ashbridge’s nurse to his father, and Michael
had nothing whatever to add to these. His fear of him had given place
to a quiet contempt, which he did not care to think about, and certainly
did not care to express.
Every now and then Lady Ashbridge had what Michael thought of as a good
hour or two, when she went back to her content and childlike joy in his
presence, and it was clear, when presently she came downstairs as he
still lingered in the garden, reading the daily paper in the sun, that
one of these better intervals had visited her. She, too, it appeared,
felt the waving of the magic wand of spring, and she noted the signs of
it with a joy that was infinitely pathetic.
“My dear,” she said, “what a beautiful morning! Is it wise to sit out
of doors without your hat, Michael? Shall not I go and fetch it for you?
No? Then let us sit here and talk. It is spring, is it not? Look how the
birds are collecting twigs for their nests! I wonder how they know that
the time has come round again. Sweet little birds! How bold and merry
they are.”
She edged her way a little nearer him, so that her shoulder leaned on
his arm.
“My dear, I wish you were going to nest, too,” she said. “I wonder--do
you think I have been ill-natured and unkind to your Sylvia, and that
makes her not come to see me now? I do remember being vexed at her for
not wanting to marry you, and perhaps I talked unkindly about her. I am
sorry, for my being cross to her will do no good; it will only make
her more unwilling than ever to marry a man who has such an unpleasant
mamma. Will she come to see me again, do you think, if I ask her?”
These good hours were too rare in their appearances and swift in their
vanishings to warrant the certainty that she would feel the same this
afternoon, and Michael tried to turn the subject.
“Ah, we shall have to think about that, mother,” he said. “Look, there
is a quarrel going on between those two sparrows. They both want the
same straw.”
She followed his pointing finger, easily diverted.
“Oh, I wish they would not quarrel,” she said. “It is so sad and stupid
to quarrel, instead of being agreeable and pleasant. I do not like them
to do that. There, one has flown away! And see, the crocuses are coming
up. Indeed it is spring. I should like to see the country to-day. If you
are not busy, Michael, would you take me out into the country? We might
go to Richmond Park perhaps, for that is in the opposite direction from
Ashbridge, and look at the deer and the budding trees. Oh, Michael,
might we take lunch with us, and eat it out of doors? I want to enjoy as
much as I can of this spring day.”
She clung closer to Michael.
“Everything seems so fragile, dear,” she whispered. “Everything may
break. . . . Sometimes I am frightened.”
The little expedition was soon moving, after a slight altercation
between Lady Ashbridge and her nurse, whom she wished to leave behind
in order to enjoy Michael’s undiluted society. But Miss Baker, who had
already spoken to Michael, telling him she was not quite happy in her
mind about her patient, was firm about accompanying them, though she
obligingly effaced herself as far as possible by taking the box-seat by
the chauffeur as they drove down, and when they arrived, and Michael
and his mother strolled about in the warm sunshine before lunch, keeping
carefully in the background, just ready to come if she was wanted. But
indeed it seemed as if no such precautions were necessary, for never had
Lady Ashbridge been more amenable, more blissfully content in her son’s
companionship. The vernal hour, that first smell of the rejuvenated
earth, as it stirred and awoke from its winter sleep had reached her
no less than it had reached the springing grass and the heart of buried
bulbs, and never perhaps in all her life had she been happier than on
that balmy morning of early March. Here the stir of spring that had
crept across miles of smoky houses to the gardens behind Curzon Street,
was more actively effervescent, and the “bare, leafless choirs” of the
trees, which had been empty of song all winter, were once more resonant
with feathered worshippers. Through the tussocks of the grey grass of
last year were pricking the vivid shoots of green, and over the grove
of young birches and hazel the dim, purple veil of spring hung mistlike.
Down by the water-edge of the Penn ponds they strayed, where moor-hens
scuttled out of rhododendron bushes that overhung the lake, and hurried
across the surface of the water, half swimming, half flying, for the
shelter of some securer retreat. There, too, they found a plantation of
willows, already in bud with soft moleskin buttons, and a tortoiseshell
butterfly, evoked by the sun from its hibernation, settled on one of the
twigs, opening and shutting its diapered wings, and spreading them to
the warmth to thaw out the stiffness and inaction of winter. Blackbirds
fluted in the busy thickets, a lark shot up near them soaring and
singing till it became invisible in the luminous air, a suspended
carol in the blue, and bold male chaffinches, seeking their mates with
twittered songs, fluttered with burr of throbbing wings. All the promise
of spring was there--dim, fragile, but sure, on this day of days,
this pearl that emerged from the darkness and the stress of winter,
iridescent with the tender colours of the dawning year.
They lunched in the open motor, Miss Baker again obligingly removing
herself to the box seat, and spreading rugs on the grass sat in the
sunshine, while Lady Ashbridge talked or silently watched Michael as he
smoked, but always with a smile. The one little note of sadness which
she had sounded when she said she was frightened lest everything should
break, had not rung again, and yet all day Michael heard it echoing
somewhere dimly behind the song of the wind and the birds, and the
shoots of growing trees. It lurked in the thickets, just eluding him,
and not presenting itself to his direct gaze; but he felt that he saw it
out of the corner of his eye, only to lose it when he looked at it. And
yet for weeks his mother had never seemed so well: the cloud had lifted
off her this morning, and, but for some vague presage of trouble that
somehow haunted his mind, refusing to be disentangled, he could have
believed that, after all, medical opinion might be at fault, and that,
instead of her passing more deeply into the shadows as he had been
warned was inevitable, she might at least maintain the level to which
she had returned to-day. All day she had been as she was before the
darkness and discontent of those last weeks had come upon her: he
who knew her now so well could certainly have affirmed that she had
recovered the serenity of a month ago. It was so much, so tremendously
much that she should do this, and if only she could remain as she had
been all day, she would at any rate be happy, happier, perhaps, than she
had consciously been in all the stifled years which had preceded this.
Nothing else at the moment seemed to matter except the preservation to
her of such content, and how eagerly would he have given all the service
that his young manhood had to offer, if by that he could keep her
from going further into the bewildering darkness that he had been told
awaited her.
There was some little trouble, though no more than the shadow of a
passing cloud, when at last he said that they must be getting back to
town, for the afternoon was beginning to wane. She besought him for five
minutes more of sitting here in the sunshine that was still warm, and
when those minutes were over, she begged for yet another postponement.
But then the quiet imposition of his will suddenly conquered her, and
she got up.
“My dear, you shall do what you like with me,” she said, “for you have
given me such a happy day. Will you remember that, Michael? It has been
a nice day. And might we, do you think, ask Miss Falbe to come to tea
with us when we get back? She can but say ‘no,’ and if she comes, I will
be very good and not vex her.”
As she got back into the motor she stood up for a moment, her vague blue
eyes scanning the sky, the trees, the stretch of sunlit park.
“Good-bye, lake, happy lake and moor-hens,” she said. “Good-bye, trees
and grass that are growing green again. Good-bye, all pretty, peaceful
things.”
Michael had no hesitation in telephoning to Sylvia when they got back to
town, asking her if she could come and have tea with his mother, for the
gentle, affectionate mood of the morning still lasted, and her eagerness
to see Sylvia was only equalled by her eagerness to be agreeable to her.
He was greedy, whenever it could be done, to secure a pleasure for his
mother, and this one seemed in her present mood a perfectly safe one.
Added to that impulse, in itself sufficient, there was his own longing
to see her again, that thirst that never left him, and soon after they
had got back to Curzon Street Sylvia was with them, and, as before,
in preparation for a long visit, she had taken off her hat. To-day she
divested herself of it without any suggestion on Lady Ashbridge’s part,
and this immensely pleased her.
“Look, Michael,” she said. “Miss Falbe means to stop a long time. That
is sweet of her, is it not? She is not in such a hurry to get away
today. Sugar, Miss Falbe? Yes, I remember you take sugar and milk, but
no cream. Well, I do think this is nice!”
Sylvia had seen neither mother nor son for a couple of weeks, and her
eyes coming fresh to them noticed much change in them both. In Lady
Ashbridge this change, though marked, was indefinable enough: she seemed
to the girl to have somehow gone much further off than she had been
before; she had faded, become indistinct. It was evident that she found,
except when she was talking to Michael, a far greater difficulty in
expressing herself, the channels of communication, as it were, were
getting choked. . . . With Michael, the change was easily stated, he
looked terribly tired, and it was evident that the strain of these weeks
was telling heavily on him. And yet, as Sylvia noticed with a sudden
sense of personal pride in him, not one jot of his patient tenderness
for his mother was abated. Tired as he was, nervous, on edge, whenever
he dealt with her, either talking to her, or watching for any little
attention she might need, his face was alert with love. But she noticed
that when the footman brought in tea, and in arranging the cups let a
spoon slip jangling from its saucer, Michael jumped as if a bomb had
gone off, and under his breath said to the man, “You clumsy fool!”
Little as the incident was, she, knowing Michael’s courtesy and
politeness, found it significant, as bearing on the evidence of his
tired face. Then, next moment his mother said something to him, and
instantly his love transformed and irradiated it.
To-day, more than ever before, Lady Ashbridge seemed to exist only
through him. As Sylvia knew, she had been for the last few weeks
constantly disagreeable to him; but she wondered whether this exacting,
meticulous affection was not harder to bear. Yet Michael, in spite of
the nervous strain which now showed itself so clearly, seemed to find no
difficulty at all in responding to it. It might have worn his nerves to
tatters, but the tenderness and love of him passed unhampered through
the frayed communications, for it was he himself who was brought into
play. It was of that Michael, now more and more triumphantly revealed,
that Sylvia felt so proud, as if he had been a possession, an
achievement wholly personal to her. He was her Michael--it was just that
which was becoming evident, since nothing else would account for her
claim of him, unconsciously whispered by herself to herself.
It was not long before Lady Ashbridge’s nurse appeared, to take her
upstairs to rest. At that her patient became suddenly and unaccountably
agitated: all the happy content of the day was wiped off her mind. She
clung to Michael.
“No, no, Michael,” she said, “they mustn’t take me away. I know they are
going to take me away from you altogether. You mustn’t leave me.”
Nurse Baker came towards her.
“Now, my lady, you mustn’t behave like that,” she said. “You know you
are only going upstairs to rest as usual before dinner. You will see
Lord Comber again then.”
She shrank from her, shielding herself behind Michael’s shoulder.
“No, Michael, no!” she repeated. “I’m going to be taken away from you.
And look, Miss--ah, my dear, I have forgotten your name--look, she has
got no hat on. She was going to stop with me a long time. Michael, must
I go?”
Michael saw the nurse looking at her, watching her with that quiet eye
of the trained attendant.
Then she spoke to Michael.
“Well, if Lord Comber will just step outside with me,” she said, “we’ll
see if we can arrange for you to stop a little longer.”
“And you’ll come back, Michael,” said she.
Michael saw that the nurse wanted to say something to him, and with
infinite gentleness disentangled the clinging of Lady Ashbridge’s hand.
“Why, of course I will,” he said. “And won’t you give Miss Falbe another
cup of tea?”
Lady Ashbridge hesitated a moment.
“Yes, I’ll do that,” she said. “And by the time I’ve done that you will
be back again, won’t you?”
Michael followed the nurse from the room, who closed the door without
shutting it.
“There’s something I don’t like about her this evening,” she said. “All
day I have been rather anxious. She must be watched very carefully. Now
I want you to get her to come upstairs, and I’ll try to make her go to
bed.”
Michael felt his mouth go suddenly dry.
“What do you expect?” he said.
“I don’t expect anything, but we must be prepared. A change comes very
quickly.”
Michael nodded, and they went back together.
“Now, mother darling,” he said, “up you go with Nurse Baker. You’ve been
out all day, and you must have a good rest before dinner. Shall I come
up and see you soon?”
A curious, sly look came into Lady Ashbridge’s face.
“Yes, but where am I going to?” she said. “How do I know Nurse Baker
will take me to my own room?”
“Because I promise you she will,” said Michael.
That instantly reassured her. Mood after mood, as Michael saw, were
passing like shadows over her mind.
“Ah, that’s enough!” she said. “Good-bye, Miss--there! the name’s gone
again! But won’t you sit here and have a talk to Michael, and let him
show you over the house to see if you like it against the time--Oh,
Michael said I mustn’t worry you about that. And won’t you stop and have
dinner with us, and afterwards we can sing.”
Michael put his arm around her.
“We’ll talk about that while you’re resting,” he said. “Don’t keep Nurse
Baker waiting any longer, mother.”
She nodded and smiled.
“No, no; mustn’t keep anybody waiting,” she said. “Your father taught me
to be punctual.”
When they had left the room together, Sylvia turned to Michael.
“Michael, my dear,” she said, “I think you are--well, I think you are
Michael.”
She saw that at the moment he was not thinking of her at all, and her
heart honoured him for that.
“I’m anxious about my mother to-night,” he said. “She has been so--I
suppose you must call it--well all day, but the nurse isn’t easy about
her.”
Suddenly all his fears and his fatigue and his trouble looked out of his
eyes.
“I’m frightened,” he said, “and it’s so unutterably feeble of me. And
I’m tired: you don’t know how tired, and try as I may I feel that all
the time it is no use. My mother is slipping, slipping away.”
“But, my dear, no wonder you are tired,” she said. “Michael, can’t
anybody help? It isn’t right you should do everything.”
He shook his head, smiling.
“They can’t help,” he said. “I’m the only person who can help her. And
I--”
He stood up, bracing mind and body.
“And I’m so brutally proud of it,” he said. “She wants me. Well, that’s
a lot for a son to be able to say. Sylvia, I would give anything to keep
her.”
Still he was not thinking of her, and knowing that, she came close
to him and put her arm in his. She longed to give him some feeling of
comradeship. She could be sisterly to him over this without suggesting
to him what she could not be to him. Her instinct had divined right,
and she felt the answering pressure of his elbow that acknowledged her
sympathy, welcomed it, and thought no more about it.
“You are giving everything to keep her,” she said. “You are giving
yourself. What further gift is there, Michael?”
He kept her arm close pressed by him, and she knew by the frankness of
that holding caress he was thinking of her still either not at all, or,
she hoped, as a comrade who could perhaps be of assistance to courage
and clear-sightedness in difficult hours. She wanted to be no more than
that to him just now; it was the most she could do for him, but with
a desire, the most acute she had ever felt for him, she wanted him to
accept that--to take her comradeship as he would have surely taken her
brother’s. Once, in the last intimate moments they had had together, he
had refused to accept that attitude from her--had felt it a relationship
altogether impossible. She had seen his point of view, and recognised
the justice of the embarrassment. Now, very simply but very eagerly,
she hoped, as with some tugging strain, that he would not reject it. She
knew she had missed this brother, who had refused to be brother to her.
But he had been about his own business, and he had been doing his own
business, with a quiet splendour that drew her eyes to him, and as they
stood there, thus linked, she wondered if her heart was following. . . .
She had seen, last December, how reasonable it was of him to refuse this
domestic sort of intimacy with her; now, she found herself intensely
longing that he would not persist in his refusal.
Suddenly Michael awoke to the fact of her presence, and abruptly he
moved away from her.
“Thanks, Sylvia,” he said. “I know I have your--your good wishes.
But--well, I am sure you understand.”
She understood perfectly well. And the understanding of it cut her to
the quick.
“Have you got any right to behave like that to me, Michael?” she asked.
“What have I done that you should treat me quite like that?”
He looked at her, completely recalled in mind to her alone. All the
hopes and desires of the autumn smote him with encompassing blows.
“Yes, every right,” he said. “I wasn’t heeding you. I only thought of my
mother, and the fact that there was a very dear friend by me. And then I
came to myself: I remembered who the friend was.”
They stood there in silence, apart, for a moment. Then Michael came
closer. The desire for human sympathy, and that the sympathy he most
longed for, gripped him again.
“I’m a brute,” he said. “It was awfully nice of you to--to offer me
that. I accept it so gladly. I’m wretchedly anxious.”
He looked up at her.
“Take my arm again,” he said.
She felt the crook of his elbow tighten again on her wrist. She had not
known before how much she prized that.
“But are you sure you are right in being anxious, Mike?” she asked.
“Isn’t it perhaps your own tired nerves that make you anxious?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been tired a long time, you see,
and I never felt about my mother like this. She has been so bright and
content all day, and yet there were little lapses, if you understand.
It was as if she knew: she said good-bye to the lake and the jolly
moor-hens and the grass. And her nurse thinks so, too. She called me out
of the room just now to tell me that. . . . I don’t know why I should
tell you these depressing things.”
“Don’t you?” she asked. “But I do. It’s because you know I care.
Otherwise you wouldn’t tell me: you couldn’t.”
For a moment the balance quavered in his mind between Sylvia the beloved
and Sylvia the friend. It inclined to the friend.
“Yes, that’s why,” he said. “And I reproach myself, you know. All these
years I might, if I had tried harder, have been something to my mother.
I might have managed it. I thought--at least I felt--that she didn’t
encourage me. But I was a beast to have been discouraged. And now her
wanting me has come just when it isn’t her unclouded self that wants me.
It’s as if--as if it had been raining all day, and just on sunset there
comes a gleam in the west. And so soon after it’s night.”
“You made the gleam,” said Sylvia.
“But so late; so awfully late.”
Suddenly he stood stiff, listening to some sound which at present
she did not hear. It sounded a little louder, and her ears caught the
running of footsteps on the stairs outside. Next moment the door opened,
and Lady Ashbridge’s maid put in a pale face.
“Will you go to her ladyship, my lord?” she said. “Her nurse wants you.
She told me to telephone to Sir James.”
Sylvia moved with him, not disengaging her arm, towards the door.
“Michael, may I wait?” she said. “You might want me, you know. Please
let me wait.”
Lady Ashbridge’s room was on the floor above, and Michael ran up the
intervening stairs three at a time. He knocked and entered and wondered
why he had been sent for, for she was sitting quietly on her sofa near
the window. But he noticed that Nurse Baker stood very close to her.
Otherwise there was nothing that was in any way out of the ordinary.
“And here he is,” said the nurse reassuringly as he entered.
Lady Ashbridge turned towards the door as Michael came in, and when he
met her eyes he knew why he had been sent for, why at this moment Sir
James was being summoned. For she looked at him not with the clouded
eyes of affection, not with the mother-spirit striving to break
through the shrouding trouble of her brain, but with eyes of blank
non-recognition. She saw him with the bodily organs of her vision,
but the picture of him was conveyed no further: there was a blank wall
behind her eyes.
Michael did not hesitate. It was possible that he still might be
something to her, that he, his presence, might penetrate.
“But you are not resting, mother,” he said. “Why are you sitting up? I
came to talk to you, as I said I would, while you rested.”
Suddenly into those blank, irresponsive eyes there leaped recognition.
He saw the pupils contract as they focused themselves on him, and hand
in hand with recognition there leaped into them hate. Instantly that
was veiled again. But it had been there, and now it was not banished; it
lurked behind in the shadows, crouching and waiting.
She answered him at once, but in a voice that was quite toneless. It
seemed like that of a child repeating a lesson which it had learned by
heart, and could be pronounced while it was thinking of something quite
different.
“I was waiting till you came, my dear,” she said. “Now I will lie down.
Come and sit by me, Michael.”
She watched him narrowly while she spoke, then gave a quick glance at
her nurse, as if to see that they were not making signals to each other.
There was an easy chair just behind her head, and as Michael wheeled it
up near her sofa, he looked at the nurse. She moved her hand slightly
towards the left, and interpreting this, he moved the chair a little to
the left, so that he would not sit, as he had intended, quite close to
the sofa.
“And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?” asked Michael.
She looked at him sideways and slowly. Then again, as if recollecting a
task she had committed to memory, she answered.
“Yes, so much,” she said. “All the trees and the birds and the sunshine.
I enjoyed them so much.”
She paused a moment.
“Bring your chair a little closer, my darling,” she said. “You are so
far off. And why do you wait, nurse? I will call you if I want you.”
Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror. He understood
quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother,
and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black
horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are
brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in
those most nearly allied to them. Physically, on the material plane, he
had no fear at all.
He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it
closer, but he came actually no nearer her.
“Why don’t you go away, nurse?” said Lady Ashbridge, “and leave my son
and me to talk about our nice day in the country?”
Nurse Baker answered quite naturally.
“I want to talk, too, my lady,” she said. “I went with you and Lord
Comber. We all enjoyed it together.”
It seemed to Michael that his mother made some violent effort towards
self-control. He saw one of her hands that were lying on her knee clench
itself, so that the knuckles stood out white.
“Yes, we will all talk together, then,” she said. “Or--er--shall I have
a little doze first? I am rather sleepy with so much pleasant air. And
you are sleepy, too, are you not, Michael? Yes, I see you look sleepy.
Shall we have a little nap, as I often do after tea? Then, when I am
fresh again, you shall come back, nurse, and we will talk over our
pleasant day.”
When he entered the room, Michael had not quite closed the door, and
now, as half an hour before, he heard steps on the stairs. A moment
afterwards his mother heard them too.
“What is that?” she said. “Who is coming now to disturb me, just when I
wanted to have a nap?”
There came a knock at the door. Nurse Baker did not move her head, but
continued watching her patient, with hands ready to act.
“Come in,” she said, not looking round.
Lady Ashbridge’s face was towards the door. As Sir James entered, she
suddenly sprang up, and in her right hand that lay beside her was a
knife, which she had no doubt taken from the tea-table when she came
upstairs. She turned swiftly towards Michael, and stabbed at him with
it.
“It’s a trap,” she cried. “You’ve led me into a trap. They are going to
take me away.”
Michael had thrown up his arm to shield his head. The blow fell between
shoulder and elbow, and he felt the edge of the knife grate on his bone.
And from deep in his heart sprang the leaping fountains of compassion
and love and yearning pity.