THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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than hers, and she was no longer in the least afraid of him. Indeed it struck her that morning as she came in, with a sense of wonder, that she had ever found him formidable.
"Good-morning, my dear," she said, "but how very surprising. Has everybody else finished and gone out? Waldenech, I am so glad you suggested coming here, and I hope you haven't regretted it."
"I have not enjoyed any days so much since you left me," he said.
"How dear of you to say that! Every one thought it so extraordinary that you should want to come here or that I should let you, but I am delighted you did."
He left his place, and came to sit in a chair next her. The remains of Nadine's breakfast were on a plate opposite: half a poached egg, some melon rind, marmalade and a cigarette end. He pushed these rather discouraging relics away.
"It is not extraordinary that I should want to come here," he said, "for the simple reason that you are the one woman I ever really cared about. I always cared for you—"
"There are others who think you occasionally cared for them," remarked Dodo.
"That may be so. Now I should like to stop on. May I do so?"
"No, my dear, I am afraid that you certainly may not," she said. "Jack comes to-day and the situation would not be quite comfortable, not to say decent."
"Do you think that matters?" he asked.
"It certainly is going to matter. You haven't really got a European mind, Waldenech. Your mind is probably Thibetan. Is it Thibet where you do exactly as you feel inclined? The place where there are Llamas."
"I do as I feel inclined wherever I am," said he.
Dodo remembered, again with wonder, the awful mastery that that sort of sentence as delivered by him used to have for her. Now it had none of any kind: his personality had simply ceased to be dominant with regard to her.
"But then you won't be here," said she. "You will go by that very excellent train that never stops at all; I have reserved a carriage for you."
He lit a cigarette.
"I must have been insane to behave to you as I did," he said. "It was most intensely foolish from a purely selfish point of view."
She patted his hand which lay on the table-cloth.
"Certainly it was," she said, "if you wanted to keep me. I told you so more than once. I told you that there were limits, but you appeared to believe there were not. That was quite like you, my dear. You always thought yourself a Czar. I do not think we need to go into past histories."
He got up.
"Dodo, would you ever under any circumstances come back to me?" he said. "There is Nadine, you know. It gives her a better chance—"
Dodo interrupted him.
"You are not sincere when you say that. It isn't of Nadine that you think. As for your question, I have never heard of any circumstances which would induce me to do as you suggest. Of course we cannot say that they don't exist, but I have never come across them. Don't let us think of it, Waldenech: it is quite impossible. If you were dying, I would come, but under the distinct understanding that I should go away again, in case you got better, as I am sure I hope you would. I don't bear you the slightest ill-will. You didn't spoil my life at all, though it is true you often made me both angry and miserable. As regards Nadine, she has an excellent chance, as you call it, under the present arrangements. All my friends have come back to me, except Mrs. Vivian."
"Mrs. Vivian?" said he. "Oh, yes, an English type, earnest widow."
"With an ear-trumpet now," continued Dodo; "and I shall get her some day. And Jack comes this afternoon. Voilà, the round table again! I take up the old life anew, with the younger generation as well, not a penny the worse."
"You are a good many pennies the better," said he in self-justification. "As regards Lord Chesterford: why is he coming here?"
"I suppose because, like you, he wants to see me and Nadine or both of us."
"Do you suppose he wants to marry you?" he asked. "Will you marry him?"
Dodo got up, reveling in her sense of liberty.
"Waldenech, you don't seem to realize that certain questions from you to me are impertinent," she said. "My dear, what I do now is none of your business. You have as much right to ask Mrs. Vivian whether she is thinking of marrying again. You have been so discreet and pleasant all these days: don't break down now. I have not the slightest idea if Jack wants to marry me now, as a matter of fact; and I have really no idea if I would marry him in case he did. It is more than twenty years since I spoke to him—oh, I spoke to him out of a taxi-cab the other day, but he did not answer—and I have no idea what he is like. In twenty years one may become an entirely different person. However, that is all my business, and no one else's. Now, if you have finished, let us take a stroll in the garden before your carriage comes round."
"I ask then a favor of you," he said.
"And what is that?"
"That you be yourself just for this stroll: that you be as you used to be when we met that summer at Zermatt."
Dodo was rather touched: she was also relieved that the favor was one so easy to grant. She took his arm as they left the dining-room and came out into the brilliant sunshine.
"That is dear of you to remember Zermatt," she said. "Oh, Waldenech, think of those great mountains still standing there in their silly rows with their noses in the air. How frightfully fatiguing! And they all used to look as if they were cuts with each other, and there they'll be a thousand years hence, not having changed in the least. But I'm not sure we don't have the better time scampering about for a few years, and running in and out like mice, though we get uglier and older every day. Look, there is poor John Sturgis coming towards us: let us quickly go in the opposite direction. Ah, he has seen us!—Dear John, Nadine was looking for you, I believe. I think she expected you to read something to her after breakfast about Goths or Gothic architecture. Or was it Bishop Algie you were talking to last night about cathedrals? One or the other, I am sure. He said he so much enjoyed his talk with you."
Waldenech felt that Dodo was behaving exactly as she used to behave at Zermatt. Somehow in his sluggish and alcoholic soul there rose vibrations like those he had felt then.
"Talk to him or me, it does not matter," he said in German to her, "but talk like that. That is what I want."
Dodo gave him one glance of extraordinary meaning. This little muttered speech strangely reminded her of the pæan in the thrush's song at dawn. It recalled a poignancy of emotion that belonged to days long past, but the same poignancy of feeling was hers still. She could easily feel and habitually felt, in spite of her forty and more years, the mere out-bubbling of life that expressed itself in out-bubbling speech. She also rather welcomed the presence of a third party: it was easier for her to bubble to anybody rather than to Waldenech. She buttonholed the perfectly willing John.
"Bishop Algie is such a dear, isn't he?" she said. "He is accustomed not to talk at all, and so talking is a treat to him, and he loved you. He is taking a cinematograph show, all about the Acts of the Apostles, round the country next autumn to collect funds for Maud's orphanage. The orphanage is already built, but there are no orphans. I think the money he collects is to get orphans to go there, scholarships I suppose. He made all his friends group themselves for scenes in the acts, and he is usually St. Paul. There is a delicious shipwreck where they are tying up the boat with rug-straps and ropes. He had it taken in the bay here, and it was extremely rough, which made it all the more realistic because dear Algie is a very bad sailor and while he was being exceedingly unwell over the side, his halo fell off and sank."
"We did not talk about the Acts of the Apostles last night," said John firmly, "we talked about Gothic architecture, and Piccadilly, and Wagner."
"But how entrancing," said Dodo. "I particularly love Siegfried because it is like a pantomime. Do you remember when the dragon comes out of his cave looking exactly like Paddington station, with a red light on