THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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I am really altogether on Nadine's side. I think it is wonderful that she should now be waiting so eagerly and humbly for Hugh, poor crippled Hugh, as he at present is, to speak. She has chosen the good part like Mary, and I want you for the present to take it away from her. It's wiser for her to go, but am I," asked Dodo grammatically, "to supply the ruthless foe, which is you, with guns and ammunition against my daughter?"
"You can't take both sides," remarked Jack.
"Jack, I wish you were a woman for one minute, just to feel how ludicrous such an observation is. Our lives—not perhaps Edith's—are passed in taking both sides. My whole heart goes out to Hugh, who has been so punished for his gallant recklessness, and then the moment I say 'punished' I think of Nadine's awakened love and shout, 'No, I meant rewarded.' Then I think of Nadine, and wonder if I could bear being married to a cripple, and simultaneously, now that she has shown she can love, I cannot bear the thought of her being married to anybody else. After all Nelson had only one eye and one arm, and though he wasn't exactly married to Lady Hamilton, I'm sure she was divinely happy. But then, best of all, I think of Hugh making a complete recovery, and once more coming to Nadine with his great brown doggy eyes, and telling her.... Then for once I don't take both sides, but only one, which is theirs, and if it would advance their happiness, I would even take away from poor little Seymour his jade and his Antoinette, which is all that Nadine left him with, without a single qualm of regret."
Jack considered this a moment.
"After all, she has left him where she found him," said Jack, who had rather taken Edith's view about their marriage. "He had only his Antoinette and his jade when she accepted him, and until you make a further raid, he will have them still."
Dodo shook her head.
"Jack, it is rather tiresome of you," she said. "You are making me begin to have qualms for Seymour. She had found his heart for him, you see, and now having taken everything out of it, she has gone away again, leaving him a cupboard as empty as Mother Hubbard's."
"He will put the jade back—and Antoinette," said Jack hopefully.
Dodo got up.
"That is what I doubt," she said. "Until we have known a thing, we can't miss it. We only miss it when we have known it, and it is taken away, leaving the room empty. Then old things won't always go back into their places again; they look shabby and uninteresting, and the room is spoiled. It is very unfortunate. But what is to happen when a girl's heart is suddenly awakened? Is she to give it an opiate? What is the opiate for heart-ache? Surely not marriage with somebody different. Yet jilt is an ugly word."
Dodo looked at Jack with a sort of self-deprecation.
"Don't blame Nadine, darling," she said. "She inherited it; it runs in the family."
Jack jumped up, and took Dodo's hands in his.
"You shall not talk horrible scandal about the woman I love," he said.
"But it's true," said Dodo.
"Therefore it is the more abominable of you to repeat it," said he.
But there was a certain obstinacy about Dodo that morning.
"I think it's good for me to keep that scandal alive in my heart," she said. "Usen't the monks to keep peas in their boots to prevent them from getting too comfortable?"
"Monks were idiots," said Jack loudly, "and any one less like a monk than you, I never saw. Monk indeed! Besides, I believe they used to boil the peas first."
Dodo's face, which had been a little troubled, cleared considerably.
"That showed great commonsense," she said. "I don't think they can have been such idiots. Jack, if I boil that pea, would you mind my still keeping it in my boot?"
"Rather messy," said he. "Better take it out. After all, you did really take it out when you married me."
Dodo raised her eyes to his.
"David shall take it out," she said.
Jack had not at present heard of this nomenclature. In fact, it does him credit that he instantly guessed to whom allusion was being made.
"Oh, that's settled, is it?" he said. "And now, David's mother, give me a little news of yourself. Is all well?"
Dodo's mouth grew extraordinarily tender.
"Oh, so well, Jesse," she said, "so well!"
She was standing a foot or so above him, on the steep hillside, and bending down to him, kissed him, and was silent a moment. Then she decided swiftly and characteristically that a few words like those that had just passed between them were as eloquent as longer speeches, and became her more usual self again.
"You are such a dear, Jack," she said, "and I will forgive your dreadful ignorance of the name of David's mother. Oh, look at the sea-gulls fishing for their lunch. Oh, for the wings of a sea-gull, not to fly away and be at rest at all, but to take me straight to the dining-room. And I feel certain Nadine will listen to you, and it would be a good thing to take her away for a little. She is living on her nerves, which is as expensive as eating pearls like Cleopatra."
"Drinking," said Jack. "She dissolved them—"
"Darling, vinegar doesn't dissolve pearls: it is a complete mistake to suppose it does. She took the pearls like a pill, and drank some vinegar afterwards. Jack, pull me up the hill, not because I am tired, but because it is pleasanter so. I am sorry you are going to-morrow, and I shall make love to Hughie after you've gone and pretend it's you. I do pray Hughie may get quite well, and he and Nadine, and you and I all have our heart's desire. Edith too: I hope she will write a symphony so beautiful that by common consent we shall throw away all the works of Beethoven and Bach and Brahms just as we throw away antiquated Bradshaws."
She was rather out of breath after delivering herself of this series of remarkable statements, and Jack got in a word.
"And who was David's mother?" he asked, with a rather tiresome reversion to an abandoned topic.
"I don't know or care," said Dodo with dignity. "But I'm going to be."
It required all Jack's wisdom to persuade Nadine to go away with him, more particularly because at the first opening of the subject, Edith, who was present, and whom Jack had unfortunately forgotten to take into his confidence, gave a passionate denial to the fact that she was departing also. But in the end she yielded, for during this last fortnight she had felt (as by the illumination of her love she could not help doing) that at present she 'meant' very little to Hugh. Her presence, which on that first critical night had not done less than set his face towards life instead of death, had, she felt, since then, dimly troubled and perplexed him. Every day she had thought that he would need her, but each day passed, and he still lay there, with a barrier between him and her. Yet any day he might want her, and she was loth to go. But she knew how tired and overstrained she felt herself, and the ingenious Papa Jack made use of this.
"You have given him all you can, my dear, for the present," he said. "Come away and rest, and—what is Dodo's phrase?—fill your pond again. You mustn't become exhausted; you will be so much wanted."
"And I may come back if Hughie wants me?" she asked.
That was easy to answer. If Hugh really wanted her, the difficult situation solved itself. But there was one thing more.
"I don't suppose I need ask it," said Nadine, "but if Hughie gets worse, much worse, then I may come? I—I couldn't be there, then."
Jack kissed her.
"My dear girl," he said, "what do you take me for? An ogre? But we won't think about that at all. Please God, you will not come back for that reason."
Nadine very rudely dried her eyes on his rough homespun sleeve.
"You are such a comfort, Papa," she said. "You're quite firm and strong, like—like a big wisdom-tooth. And when we are at Winston, will you let Seymour come down and see me if he wants to? And—and if he comes will you come and interrupt us in half-an-hour? I've behaved horribly to him,