"And she"s in the way?"
He a.s.sented.
"You men!" said Lady Marayne after a little pause. "What queer beasts you are! Here is a woman who is kind to you. She"s fond of you. I could tell she"s fond of you directly I heard her. And you amuse yourself with her. And then it"s Gobble, Gobble, Gobble, Great Work, Hands Clear, Big Business of the World. Why couldn"t you think of that before, Poff? Why did you begin with her?"
"It was unexpected...."
"STUFF!" said Lady Marayne for a second time. "Well," she said, "well.
Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,--oh it doesn"t matter!--whatever she calls herself, must look after herself. I can"t do anything for her. I"m not supposed even to know about her. I daresay she"ll find her consolations.
I suppose you want to go out of London and get away from it all. I can help you there, perhaps. I"m tired of London too. It"s been a tiresome season. Oh! tiresome and disappointing! I want to go over to Ireland and travel about a little. The Pothercareys want us to come. They"ve asked us twice...."
Benham braced himself to face fresh difficulties. It was amazing how different the world could look from his mother"s little parlour and from the crest of the North Downs.
"But I want to start round the world," he cried with a note of acute distress. "I want to go to Egypt and India and see what is happening in the East, all this wonderful waking up of the East, I know nothing of the way the world is going--..."
"India!" cried Lady Marayne. "The East. Poff, what is the MATTER with you? Has something happened--something else? Have you been having a love affair?--a REAL love affair?"
"Oh, d.a.m.n love affairs!" cried Benham. "Mother!--I"m sorry, mother! But don"t you see there"s other things in the world for a man than having a good time and making love. I"m for something else than that. You"ve given me the splendidest time--..."
"I see," cried Lady Marayne, "I see. I"ve bored you. I might have known I should have bored you."
"You"ve NOT bored me!" cried Benham.
He threw himself on the rug at her feet. "Oh, mother!" he said, "little, dear, gallant mother, don"t make life too hard for me. I"ve got to do my job, I"ve got to find my job."
"I"ve bored you," she wept.
Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed distressing grief of a disappointed child. She put her pretty be-ringed little hands in front of her face and recited the acc.u.mulation of her woes.
"I"ve done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you and I"ve BORED you."
"Mother!"
"Don"t come near me, Poff! Don"t TOUCH me! All my plans. All my ambitions. Friends--every one. You don"t know all I"ve given up for you...."
He had never seen his mother weep before. Her self-abandonment amazed him. Her words were distorted by her tears. It was the most terrible and distressing of crises....
"Go away from me! How can you help me? All I"ve done has been a failure!
Failure! Failure!"
8
That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham"s voice again. "I must do my job," he was repeating, "I must do my job. Anyhow...."
And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little unsurely: "Aristocracy...."
The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second ordeal.
Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made everything tormentingly touching and difficult. She convinced him she was really in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen his freshness and simplicity through her experienced eyes he would have known there was sound reason why she should have found him exceptional. And when his clumsy hints of compensation could no longer be ignored she treated him with a soft indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft and tender. She looked at him with pained eyes and a quiver of the lips.
What did he think she was? And then a little less credibly, did he think she would have given herself to him if she hadn"t been in love with him?
Perhaps that was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether true to her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her money.
But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman in the case. He a.s.sured her and she seemed rea.s.sured, and then presently she was back at exactly the same question. Would no woman ever understand the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for the world?
One sort of woman perhaps....
It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years and more have pa.s.sed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth. How slight it is, how invisible it has been, how suddenly it appears! And the sunshine of the warm April afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined unmercenary pose, betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in her dress. He had never noticed these shadows upon her or her setting before and their effect was to fill him with a strange regretful tenderness....
Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire.
He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed. He forgot the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered his mother"s second contemptuous "STUFF!"
Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected. Why hadn"t he left this little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone? And since he hadn"t done so, what right had he now to back out of their common adventure? He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, pa.s.sed across his heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought of the banns....
"You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won"t you?" said Mrs. Skelmersdale, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over. "You will do that."
He couldn"t keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....
His spirit went limping from that interview. She chose to stay behind in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was sitting in the same att.i.tude looking at him as he receded, and she had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up to it. The third time he waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand.
Then the trees hid her....
This s.e.x business was a d.a.m.nable business. If only because it made one hurt women....
He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed his mother. Was he a brute? Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this aristocracy? Was his belief anything more than a theory? Was he only dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields? And while he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his dreaming....
So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with women.
Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and tempered, who would understand.
9
So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory. But mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham"s outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother"s thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady"s happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn"t; the mere act of making it would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.
There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham"s life were too complicated and scattered for a c.u.mulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay. Lady Marayne"s moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons for regretting it.
"Ah!" she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: "you told me you were alone!"...
Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London. They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.
"When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry," she remembered with a flash. "You said, "Do I tell lies?""
"I WAS alone. Until-- It was an accident. On my walk I was alone."
But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.