THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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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