THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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It seemed an eternity before she asked him if he was comfortable, and made her long-delayed exit. Even then she reminded him that the doctor was due in half-an-hour.
But for half-an-hour he would be alone now, and for the first time since his accident he found that he wanted to think. Hitherto his mind had sat vacant, like an idle passenger who sees without observation or interest the transit of the country. But Dodo's visit this morning and her communications to him had made life appear a thing that once more concerned him; till now it was but a manœuver taking place round him, but outside him. Now the warmth of it reached him again, and began to circulate through him. And what she had told him was being blown out, as it were, in his brain, even as a lather of soapsuds is blown out into an iridescent bubble, on which gleam all the hues of sunset and moonrise and rainbow. The rainbow was not one of the vague dreams in which, lately, his mind had moved; it was a real thing, not receding but coming nearer to him, blown towards him by some steady breeze, not idly vagrant in the effortless air. Should it break on his heart, not into nothingness, but into the one white light out of which the sum of all lights and colors is made?
He could not doubt that it was this which Dodo meant. Nadine had thrown over Seymour and that concerned him. And then swift as the coming of the storm which they had seen together, came the thought, clear and precise as the rows of thunder-clouds, that for all he knew a barrier forever impenetrable lay between them. For he could never offer to her a cripple; the same pride that had refused to let him take an intimate place beside her after she, by her acceptance of Seymour, had definitely rejected him, forbade him, without possibility of discussion, to let her tie herself to him, unless he could stand sound and whole beside her. He must be competent in brain and bone and body to be Nadine's husband. And for that as yet he had no guarantee.
Since his accident he had not up till now cared to know precisely what his injuries were, nor whether he could ever completely recover from them. The concussion of the brain had quenched all curiosity, and interest not only in things external to him, but in himself, and he had received the assurance that he was going on very well with the unconcern that we feel for remote events. But now his thoughts flew back from Nadine and clustered round himself. He felt that he must know his chances, the best or the worst ... and yet he dreaded to know, for he could live for a little in a paradise by imagining that he would get completely well, instead of in a shattered ruin which the knowledge of the worst would strew round him.
But this morning the energy of life which for those two weeks had lain dormant in him, began to stir again. He wanted. It seemed to him but a few moments since his nurse left him that Dr. Cardew came in. He saw the flushed face and brightened eyes of his patient, and after an enquiry or two took out the thermometer which he had not used for days, and tested Hugh's temperature. He put it back again in its nickel case with a smile.
"Well, it's not any return of fever, anyhow," he said. "Do you feel different in any way this morning?"
"Yes. I want to get well."
"Highly commendable," said Dr. Cardew.
Hugh fingered the bed-clothes in sudden agitation.
"I want to know if I shall get well," he said. "I don't mean half well, in a Bath-chair, but quite well. And I want to know what my injuries were."
Dr. Cardew looked at him a moment without speaking. But it was perfectly clear that this fresh color and eagerness in Hugh's face was but the lamp of life burning brighter. There was no reason that he should not know what he asked, now that he cared to know.
"You broke your hip-bone," he said. "You also had very severe concussion of the brain. There were a quantity of little injuries."
"Oh, tell me the best and the worst of it quickly," said Hugh with impatience.
"I can tell you nothing for certain for a few days yet about the fracture. There is no reason why it should not mend perfectly. And to-day for the first time I am not anxious about the other."
Quite suddenly Hugh put his hands before his face and broke into a passion of weeping.
Chapter XIII
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