One morning a fortnight later, Jack, Dodo, and Edith were sitting together on the cliff above the bay, looking down to the sandy foreshore. Jack, finding that Dodo was obliged to stop at Meering with Nadine, had personally abandoned his third shooting-party, leaving Berts, whom he implicitly trusted to make himself and everybody else quite comfortable, in charge. Among the guests was Berts' father, whom Berts apparently kept in his place. Jack had just told Dodo and Edith the contents of Berts' letter, received that morning. All was going very well, but Berts had arranged that his father should escort two ladies of the party to see the interesting town of Lichfield one afternoon, instead of shooting the Warren beat, where birds came high and Berts' father was worse than useless. But it was certain that he would enjoy Lichfield very much, and the shoot would be more satisfactory without him. If his mother was still at Meering, Berts sent his love, and knew she would agree with him.
Edith just now, working her way through the entire orchestra, was engaged on thecor anglaiswhich, while Hugh was still so ill, Dodo insisted should not be played in the house. It gave rather melancholy notes, and was productive of moisture. But she finished apassage which seemed to have no end, before she acknowledged these compliments. Then she emptied thecor anglaisinto the heather.
"Poor Bertie is a drone," she said; "he never thinks it worth while to do anything well. Berts is better: he thinks it worth while to sit on his father really properly. I thought my energy might wake Bertie up, and that was chiefly why I married him. But it only made him go to sleep. Lichfield is about his level. I don't know anything about Lichfield, and I don't know much about Bertie. But they seem to me rather suitable. And much more can be done with thecor anglaisthan Wagner ever imagined. The solo inTristanis absolute child's play. I could perform it myself with a week's practice."
Dodo had been engaged in a small incendiary operation among the heather, with the match with which she had lit her cigarette. For the moment it seemed that her incendiarism was going to fulfil itself on larger lines than she had intended.
"Jack, I have set fire to Wales, like Lloyd George," she cried. "Stamp on it with your great feet. What great large strong feet! How beautiful are the feet of them that put out incendiary attempts in Wales! About Bertie, Edith, if you will stop playing that lamentable flute for a moment—"
"Flute?" asked Edith.
"Trombone, if you like. The point is that your vitality hasn't inspired Bertie; it has only drained him of his. You set out to give him life, and you have become his vampire. I don't say it was yourfault: it was his misfortune. But Berts is calm enough to keep your family going. The real question is about mine. Yes, Jack, that was where Hughie went into the sea, when the sea was like Switzerland. And those are the reefs, before which, though it's not grammatical, he had to reach the boat. He swam straight out from where your left foot is pointing. A Humane Society medal came for him yesterday, and Nadine pinned it upon his bed-clothes. He says it is rot, but I think he rather likes it. She pinned it on while he was asleep, and he didn't know what it meant. He thought it was the sort of thing that they give to guards of railway trains. The dear boy was rather confused, and asked if he had joined the station-masters."
Jack shaded his eyes from the sun.
"And a big sea was running?" he asked.
"But huge. It broke right up to the cliffs at the ebb. And into it he went like a duck to water."
Edith got up.
"I have heard enough of Hugh's trumpet blown," she said.
"And I have heard enough of thecor anglais," said Dodo. "Dear Edith, will you go away and play it there? You see, darling, Jack came out this morning to talk to me, and I came out to talk to him. Or we will go away if you like: the point is that somebody must."
"I shall go and play golf," said Edith with dignity. "I may not be back for lunch. Don't wait for me."
Dodo was roused to reply to this monstrous recommendation.
"If I had been in the habit of waiting for you," she said, "I should still be where I was twenty years ago. You are always in a hurry, darling, and never in time."
"I was in time for dinner last night," said Edith.
"Yes, because I told you it was at eight, when it was really at half past."
Edith blew a melancholy minor phrase.
"Leit-motif," she said, "describing the treachery of a friend."
"Tooty, tooty, tooty," said Dodo cheerfully, "describing the gay impenitence of the same friend."
Edith exploded with laughter, and put thecor anglaisinto its green-baize bag.
"Good-by," she said, "I forgive you."
"Thanks, darling. Mind you play better than anybody ever played before, as usual."
"But I do," said Edith passionately.
Dodo leaned back on the springy couch of the heather as Edith strode down the hillside.
"It's not conceit," she observed, "but conviction, and it makes her so comfortable. I have got a certain amount of it myself, and so I know what it feels like. It was dear of you to come down, Jack, and it will be still dearer of you if you can persuade Nadine to go back with you to Winston."
"But I don't want to go back to Winston. Anyhow, tell me about Nadine. I don't really know anything more than that she has thrown Seymour over, and devotes herself to Hugh."
"My dear, she has fallen head over ears in love with him."
"You are a remarkably unexpected family," Jack allowed himself to say.
"Yes; that is part of our charm. I think somewhere deep down she was always in love with him, but, so to speak, she couldn't get at it. It was like a seam of gold: you aren't rich until you have got down through the rock. And Hugh's adventure was a charge of dynamite to her; it sent the rock splintering in all directions. The gold lies in lumps before his eyes, but I am not sure whether he knows it is for him or not. He can't talk much, poor dear; he is just lying still, and slowly mending, and very likely he thinks no more than that she is only sorry for him, and wants to do what she can. But in a fortnight from now comes the date when she was to have married Seymour. He can't have forgotten that."
"Forgotten?" asked Jack.
"Yes; he doesn't remember much at present. He had severe concussion as well as that awful breakage of the hip."
"Do they think he will recover completely?" asked Jack.
"They can't tell yet. His little injuries have healed so wonderfully that they hope he may. They are more anxious about the effects of the concussion than the other. He seems in a sort of stupor still; he recognizes Nadine of course, but she hasn't, except on that first night, seemed to mean much to him."
"What was that?"
"He so nearly died then. He kept calling for her in a dreadful strange voice, and when she came he didn't know her for a time. Then she put her whole soul into it, the darling, and made him know her, and he went to sleep. She slept, or rather lay awake, all night by his bed. She saved his life, Jack; they all said so."
"It seems rather perverse to refuse to marry him when he is sound, and the moment he is terribly injured to want to," said Jack.
"My darling, it is no use criticizing people," said Dodo, "unless by your criticism you can change them. Even then it is a great responsibility. But you could no more change Nadine by criticizing her, than you could change the nature of the wildcat at the Zoo by sitting down in front of its cage, and telling it you didn't like its disposition, and that it had not a good temper. You may take it that Nadine is utterly in love with him."
"And as he has always been utterly in love with her, I don't know why you want me to take Nadine away. Bells and wedding-cake as soon as Hugh can hobble to church."
"Oh, Jack, you don't see," she said. "If I know Hughie at all, he wouldn't dream of offering himself to Nadine until it is certain that he will be an able-bodied man again. And she is expecting him to, and is worrying and wondering about it. Also, she is doing him no good now. It can't be good for an invalid to have continually before him the girl to whom he has given his soul, who has persistently refusedto accept it. It is true that they have exchanged souls now—as far as that goes my darling Nadine has so much the best of the bargain—but Hugh has to begin the—the negotiations, and he won't, even if he sees that Nadine is a willing Barkis, until he knows he has something more than a shattered unmendable thing to offer her. Consequently he is silent, and Nadine is perplexed. I will go on saying it over and over again if it makes it any clearer, but if you understand, you may signify your assent in the usual manner. Clap your great hands and stamp your great feet: oh, Jack, what a baby you are!"
"Do you suppose she would come away?" said Jack, coughing a little at the dust his great feet had raised from the loose soil.
"Yes, if you can persuade her that her presence isn't good for Hugh. So you will try; that's all right. Nadine has a great respect for Papa Jack's wisdom, and I can't think why. I always thought a lot of your heart, dear, but very little of your head. You mustn't retort that you never thought much of either of mine, because it wouldn't be manly, and I should tell you you were a coward as the Suffragettes do when they hit policemen in the face."
"And why should it be I to do all this?" asked Jack.
"Because you are Papa Jack," said Dodo, "and a girl listens to a man when she would not heed a woman. Oh, you might tell her, which is probably true, that Edith is going away to-morrow, and you want somebody to take care of you at Winston. Ithink even Nadine would see that it would not quite do if she was left here alone with Hughie. At least it is possible she might see that: you could use it to help to preach down a stepdaugher's heart. You must think of these things for yourself, though, because in my heart 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 doggyeyes, 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? Surelynot 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 afteryou'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, but I can't help it, and it—that we weren't to be married, I mean—was in theMorning Postto-day, and it looked so horrible and cold. But whatever hewants to say to me, I think half-an-hour is sufficient. I wonder—I wonder if you know why I behaved like such a pig."
"I think I might guess," said Jack.
"Then you needn't, because there's only one possible guess. So we'll assume that you know. What a nuisance women are to your poor, long-suffering sex. Especially girls."
Jack laughed.
"They are just as much a nuisance afterwards," said he. "Look at your mother, how she is making life one perpetual martyrdom to me."
"But she used to be a nuisance to you, Papa Jack," said Nadine.
"There again you are wrong," he said. "I always loved her."
"And does that prevent one's being a nuisance?" asked Nadine. "Are you sure? Because if you are, you needn't interrupt Seymour quite so soon. I said half-an-hour, because I thought that would be time enough for him to tell me what a nuisance I was—"
"You're a heartless little baggage," observed Jack.
"Not quite," said Nadine.
"Well, you're an April day," said he, seeing the smile break through.
"And that is a doubtful compliment," said she. "But you are wrong if you think I am not sorry for Seymour. Yet what was I to do, Papa Jack, when I made The Discovery?"
"Well, you're not a heartless little baggage," concededJack, "but you have taken your heart out of one piece of the baggage, and packed it in another."
"Oh, la, la," said Nadine. "We mix our metaphors."
Nadine left with Jack in the motor soon after breakfast next morning. It had been settled that she should not tell Hugh she was going, until she said good-by to him, and when she went to his room next morning to do so, she found him still asleep, and the tall nurse entirely refused to have him awakened.
"Much better for him to sleep than to say good-by," said this adamantine woman. "When he wakes, he shall be told you have gone, if he asks."
"Of course he'll ask," said Nadine.
She paused a moment.
"Will you let me know if he doesn't?" she added.
Nurse Bryerley's grim capable face relaxed into a smile. She did not quite understand the situation, but she was quite content to do her best for her patient according to her lights.
"And shall I say that you'll be back soon?" she asked.
Nadine had no direct reply to this.
"Ah, do make him get well," she said.
"That's what I'm here for. And I will say that you'll be back soon, shall I, if he wants you?"
"Soon?" said Nadine. "That minute."
Hugh slept long that morning, and Dodo was not told he was awake and ready to receive a morningcall till the travelers had been gone a couple of hours. She had spent them in a pleasant atmosphere of conscious virtue, engendered by the feeling that she had sent Jack away when she would much have preferred his stopping here. But as Dodo explained to Edith it took quite a little thing to make her feel good, whereas it took a lot to make her feel wicked.
"A nice morning, for instance," she said, "or sending my darling Jack away because it's good for Nadine, or getting a postal-order. Quite little things like that make me feel a perfect saint. Whereas the powers of hell have to do their worst, as the hymn says, to make me feel wicked."
Edith gave a rather elaborate sigh. She had to sigh carefully because she had a cigarette and a pen in her mouth, while she was scratching out a blot she had made on the score she was revising. So care was needed; otherwise cigarette and pen might have been shot from her mouth. When she spoke her utterance was indistinct and mumbling.
"I suppose you infer that you are more at home in heaven than hell," she said, "since just a touch makes you feel a saint. I should say it was the other way about. You are so at home in the other place that the most abysmal depths of infamy have to be presented to you before you know they are wicked at all, whereas you hail as divine the most infinitesimal distraction that breaks the monotonous round of vice. Perhaps I am expressing myself too strongly, but I feel strongly. The world is more high-colored to me than to other people."
"Darling, I never heard such a moderate and well-balanced statement," said Dodo. "Do go on."
"I don't want to. But I thought your optimism about yourself was sickly, and wanted a—a dash of discouragement. But you and Nadine are both the same: if you behave charmingly, you tell us to give the praise to you; if you behave abominably you say, 'I can't help it: it was Nature's fault for making me like that.' Now I am not like that: whatever I do, I take the responsibility, and say, 'I am I. Take me or leave me.' But I have no doubt that Nadine believes it has beentoowonderful of her to fall in love with Hugh. And when she jilts Seymour, she says 'Enquire at Nature's Workshop; this firm is entirely independent.' Bah!"
Dodo laughed, but her laugh died rather quickly.
"Ah, don't be hard, Edith," she said. "We most of us want encouragement at times, and we have to encourage ourselves by making ourselves out as nice as we can. Otherwise we should look on the mess we make of things as a hopeless job. Perhaps it is hopeless but that is the one thing we mustn't allow. We are like"—Dodo paused for a simile—"we are like children to whom is given a quantity of lovely little squares of mosaic, and we know, our souls know, that they can be put together into the most beautiful patterns. And we begin fairly well, but then the devil comes along, and jogs our elbow, and smashes it all up. Probably it is our own stupidity, but it is more encouraging to say it is the devil or nature, something not ourselves. Good heavens, my elbowhas jogged often enough! And when the pattern gets on well, we encourage ourselves by saying, 'This is clever and good and wise Me doing it now!' And then perhaps something very big and solemn comes our way, and we bow our heads, and know it isn't ourselves at all."
Edith had finished erasing her blot, and was gathering her sheets together. She tapped them dramatically with an inky forefinger.
"This is big and solemn," she said. "But it's Me. The artist's inspiration never comes from outside: it is always from within. I'm going to send it to have the band parts copied to-day."
At the moment the message came that Hugh received, and Dodo got up. He had received Edith one morning, but the effect was that he had eaten no lunch and had dozed uneasily all afternoon. Edith had been content with the explanation that her vitality was too strong for him, and, while ready to give him another dose of it, did not press the matter; anyhow, she had other business on hand.
He lay propped up in bed, with a wad of pillows at his back. He looked far more alert and present than he had yet done. Hitherto, he had been slow to grasp the meaning of what was said to him, and he hardly ever volunteered a statement or question, but this morning he smiled and spoke with quite unusual quickness.
"Morning, Aunt Dodo," he said. "I'm awfully brisk to-day."
Nurse Bryerley put in a warning word.
"Don't be too brisk," she said. "Please don't let him be too brisk," she added, looking at Dodo.
"Hughie, dear, you do look better," she said; "but we'll all be quite calm, and self-contained like flats."
Hugh frowned for a moment; then his face cleared again.
"I see," he said. "Bright, aren't I? Aunt Dodo, I have certainly woke up this morning. You look real, do you know; before I was never quite certain about you. You looked as if you might be a good forgery, but spurious. Have a cigarette, and why shouldn't I?"
"Wiser not," said Nurse Bryerley laconically.
Hugh's briskness did not seem to be entirely good-natured.
"How on earth could a cigarette hurt me?" he said. "Perhaps it would be wiser for Lady Chesterford not to smoke either. Aunt Dodo, you mustn't smoke. Wiser not."
Nurse Bryerley smiled with secret content.
"That's right, Mr. Graves," she said. "I like to see my patients irritable. It always shows they are getting better."
"I should have thought you might have seen that without annoying me," said Hugh.
"Well, well, I don't mind your having one cigarette to keep Lady Chesterford company," said the nurse. "But you'll be disappointed."
Dodo took out her case as Nurse Bryerley left the room. "Here you are, Hughie," she said.
Hugh lit one, and blew a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.
"Are they quite fresh, Aunt Dodo?" he said.
"Yes, dear, quite. Doesn't it taste right?"
"Yes, delicious," said Hugh, absolutely determined not to find it disappointing. "I say, what a sunny morning!"
"Is it too much in your eyes?"
"It is rather. Will you ask Nurse Bryerley to pull the blind down? Why should you?"
"Chiefly, dear, because it isn't any trouble."
Dodo pulled down the blind too far on the first attempt to be pleasing, not far enough on the second. Hugh felt she was very clumsy.
"Isn't Nadine coming to see me this morning?" he asked. "But I daresay she is tired of sitting with me every day."
Dodo came back to her chair by the bed again.
"She went off with Jack to Winston this morning," she said. "Just for a change. She was very much tired and overdone. You've been a fearful anxiety to her, you dear bad boy."
Hugh put his cigarette down and shut his mouth, as if firmly determined never to speak again.
"She came in to say good-by to you," she said, "but you were asleep and they didn't want to wake you."
There was still dead silence on Hugh's part.
"It was only settled she should go yesterday," she continued, "and she had to be persuaded. But Jack wanted one of us, and, as I say, she was very muchoverdone. Now I'm not the least overdone. So I stopped. But I wish she could have seen how much more yourself you were when you woke to-day."
At length Hugh spoke.
"What is the use of telling me that sort of tale?" he said. "She is going to be married to Seymour in a few days. She has gone away for that. I suppose in some cold-blooded way she thought it better to sneak off without telling me. No doubt it was very tactful of her."
Dodo turned round towards him.
"No, Hughie, you are quite wrong," she said. "Nadine is not going to marry Seymour at all."
Hugh lifted his right hand, and examined it cursorily. A long cut, now quite healed, ran up the length of his forefinger.
"I see," he said. "She said she would marry Seymour in order to get rid of me, and now that I have been got rid of in other ways, she has no further use for him. Isn't that it?"
His face had become quite white, and the hand with the healed wound trembled so violently that the bed shook.
"No, that is not it," said Dodo quietly. "And don't be so nervous and fidgety, my dear."
Suddenly the trembling ceased.
"Aunt Dodo, if it is not that, what is it?" he asked, in a voice that would have melted Rhadamanthus.
She turned a shining face on him, and laid her hand on his.
"Oh, Hughie, lie still and get well," she said."And then ask Nadine herself. She will come back when you want her. She told Nurse Bryerley to tell you so, if you asked."
Hugh moved across his other hand, so that Dodo's lay between his.
"I must ask you one more thing," he said. "Is it because of me in any way that she chucked Seymour? I entreat you to say 'no' if it is 'no.'"
"I can't say 'no,'" said Dodo.
Hugh drew one long sobbing breath.
"It's mere pity then," he said. "Nadine always liked me, and she was always impulsive like that. I daresay she won't marry him till I'm better, if I am ever better. She will wait till I am strong enough to enjoy it thoroughly."
Dodo interrupted him.
"Hughie, don't say bitter and untrue things like that," she said. "And don't feel them. She is not going to marry Seymour, either now or afterwards."
Once again Hugh was silent, and after an interval Dodo spoke, divining exactly what was in his irritable convalescent mind.
"I have never deceived you before, Hughie," she said, "and you have no right to distrust me now. I am telling you the truth. I also tell you the truth when I say you must get bitter thoughts out of your mind. Ah, my dear, it is not always easy. There's a beast within each of us."
"There's a beast within me," said Hugh.
"And there's a dear brave fellow whom I am so proud of," said Dodo.
Hugh's lip quivered, but there was a quality in his silence as different from that which had gone before, as there was between his callings for Nadine on the night when she fought death for him.
"And now that's enough," said Dodo. "Shall I read to you, Hughie, or shall I leave you for the present?"
He held her hand a moment longer.
"I think I will lie still and—and think," he said.
"Good luck to your fishing, dear," said she, rising.
"Good luck to your fishing?" he said. "It's on a picture. Small boy fishing, kneeling in the waves."
Dodo beat a strategic retreat.
"Is it?" she said.
But it seemed to Hugh that her voice lacked the blank enquiry tone of ignorance.
Hugh settled himself a little lower down on his backing of pillows, after Dodo had left him, and tried to arrange his mind, so that the topics that concerned it stood consecutively. But Dodo's last remark, which certainly should have stood last also in his reflections, kept on shouldering itself forward. She had wished him "good luck to his fishing," and he could not bring himself to believe that, consciously or unconsciously, there was not in her mind a certain picture, of a little winged boy, kneeling in the waves, who dropped a red line into the unquiet sea. He could not, and did not try to remember the painter, but certainly the picture had been at some exhibition which he and Nadine had attended together. A littlewinged boy.... The title was printed after the number in the catalogue.
Nadine was not to marry Seymour now or afterwards.... There came a black speck again over his thoughts. He himself had been got rid of by this crippling accident, and now she had expunged Seymour also. 'And though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love.' The lines came into his mind without any searching for them; for the moment he could not remember where he had heard them. And then memory began to awake.
Hitherto, he had not been able to recall anything of the day or two that preceded his catastrophe. A few of the immediate events before it he had never forgotten. He remembered Nadine calling out, "No Hugh, not you," he remembered her cry of "Well done"; he remembered that he had toppled in on that line of toppling waters with a small boy on his back. But now a fresh line of memory had been awakened: some connection in his brain had been restored, and he remembered their quarrel and reconciliation on the day the gale began; how she had said, "Oh, Hughie, if only I loved you!" Soon after came the portentous advent of the wind, with the blotting out of the sun, and the transformation of the summer sea.
He heard with unspeakable irritation the entry of Nurse Bryerley. That seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, for he felt as if he had been alone with Nadine, and now this assiduous grenadier broke in upon them with a hundred fidgety offices to perform. She restored to him a fallen pillow, she closed a windowthrough which a breeze was blowing rather freely, she brought him a cup of chicken-broth. 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 ofhis 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.
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 understandabout 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 hasmended 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 nothingbanalabout 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 are you going to telegraph to?" she asked.
Hugh had time for one contemptuous glance at her.
"Oh, Aunt Dodo, you ass!" he said. "Oh, by Jove, how awfully rude of me, and I haven't thanked you for coming to tell me. Thanks so much: I am so grateful to you for all your goodness to me—ah!"
He took a telegraph-form and scribbled a few words.
"May it go now?" he said.
Dodo was almost embarrassingly communicative at lunch, at which meal Edith did not appear, and the continued booming of the double-bass indicated that Art was being particularly long that morning. Consequently Dodo found herself alone with an astonished physician.
"If only a man could be a clergyman and a doctor," she said, "you could tell him everything, because clergy know all about the soul and doctors all about the body, and when you completely understand anything, you can't be shocked at it. I think I should have poisoned you, Dr. Cardew, if you had said that Hughie would never be the same man again: anyhow I shouldn't have asked you to lunch. Ah, in that case I couldn't have poisoned you! How difficult it must be to plan a crime really satisfactorily. I always have had a great deal of sympathy with criminals, because my great-grandfather was hanged for smuggling. Do have some more mutton, which calls itself lamb. I certainly shall. I'm going to have a baby, you know, or perhaps you didn't. Isn't it ridiculous at my age, and he's going to be called David."
"In case—" began Dr. Cardew.
"No, in any case," said Dodo. "I mean it certainlyis going to be a boy. You shall see. What a day for January, is it not? The year has turned, though I hope that doesn't mean it will go bad. I wish you had seen Hughie's face when I told him he wasn't going to have a Bath-chair. He looked like one of Sir Joshua Reynolds' angels with a three weeks' beard, which I shouldn't wonder if he was shaving now, since, as I said, there aren't going to be any Bath-chairs."
"I don't quite follow," said Dr. Cardew politely but desperately.
"I'm sure I don't wonder," said Dodo cordially, "although it's so clear to me. But you see, he's going to propose to my daughter now that it's certain he will be the same man again and not a different one, and no eligible young man ever has a beard. What a good title for a sordid and tragic romance 'Beards and Bath-chairs' would be. Of course Hughie instantly called for a telegraph-form, and when I asked him who he was telegraphing to, he called me an ass, in so many words, or rather so few. After all I had done for him, too! Oh, here's Edith; Dr. Cardew and I have not been listening to your playing, but we're sure it has been lovely. Do you know Dr. Cardew? And it's Mrs. Arbuthnot, or ought I to say 'she's Mrs. Arbuthnot'? Edith, if you don't mind our smoking, Dr. Cardew and I will wait and talk to you for a little, but if you do, we won't."
Edith shook hands so warmly with the doctor, that he felt he must have been an old friend of hers, and that the fact had eluded his memory. But it was onlythe general zeal which a long musical morning gave her.
"I'm sure you came to see our poor Hugh," she said. "Do tell me, is there the slightest chance of his ever walking again?"
"Not the smallest," said Dodo; "I've just been to break the news to him, and he has telegraphed to Nadine to come at once—I can't keep it up. Edith, he is going to be perfectly well again, and he has telegraphed to Nadine just the same."
Edith looked a little disappointed.
"Then I suppose we must resign ourselves to a perfectly conventional and Philistine ending," she said. "There was all the makings of a twentieth century tragedy about the situation, and now I am afraid it is going to tail off and be domestic and happy and utterly inartistic. I had better hopes for Nadine, she always looked as if there might be some wild destiny in store for her, and when she engaged herself to Seymour without caring two straws for him, I thought I heard a great fate knocking at the door—"
This was too gross an inconsistency for even Dodo to pass over.
"And you said at the time you thought the engagement was horrible and unnatural and me a wicked mother for permitting it," she cried.
"Very possibly. No doubt then I was being a woman, now I am talking as an artist. You always confuse the two, Dodo, for all your general acumen. When I have been playing all morning—"
"Scales," said Dodo.
"A great deal of the finest music in the world is based on scale passages, and the second movement of my symphony is based on them too. When I have been playing all morning, I see things as an artist. I know Dr. Cardew will agree with me: sometimes he sees things as a surgeon, sometimes as a man. As a surgeon if a hazardous operation is in front of him, he says to himself, 'This is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and it thrills me.' As a man he says, 'Poor devil, I am afraid he may die under the knife.' As for you, Dodo, artistically speaking, you spoiled a situation as—lurid as a play by Webster. 'Princess Waldenech' might have been as classical in real life as the 'Duchess of Malfi.' Artistically an atmosphere as stormy as the first act of the Valkyries surrounded you. And now instead of the 'Götterdämmerung' you are going to give us 'Hänsel und Gretel' with flights of angels."
Dodo exploded with laughter.
"And while I was still giving you 'Princess Waldenech'," she said, "you cut me for a year."
"As a woman," cried Edith; "as an artist I adored you. You were as ominous as Faust's black poodle. Of course your first marriage to a man who adored you, for whom you did not care one bar of the 'Hallelujah chorus,' was a thing that might have happened to anybody; but when, as soon as he was mercifully delivered, you got engaged to Jack, and at the last moment jilted him for that melodramatic drunkard, I thought great things were going to happen. Then you divorced him, and I waited with abeating heart. And now, would you believe it, Dr. Cardew!" cried Edith, pointing a carving fork with a slice of ham on the end of it at him. "She has married Lord Chesterford, as you know, and is going to have a baby. And all that wealth of potential tragedy is going to end in a silver christening-mug. The silly suffragette with her hammer and a plate-glass window has more sense of drama than you, Dodo. And now Nadine is going to take after you, and marry the man she loves. Hugh is just as bad: instead of dying for the sake of that blear-eyed child who comes up to enquire after him every day, he is going to live for the sake of Nadine. Drama is dead. Of course it has long been dead in literature, but I hoped it survived in life."
Dodo turned anxiously to Dr. Cardew.
"She isn't mad," she said reassuringly. "You needn't be the least frightened. She will play golf immediately after lunch."
Edith had been brought her large German pewter beer-mug, and for the moment she had put her face into it, like old-fashioned gentlemen praying into their hats on Sunday morning before service. There was a little froth on the end of her rather long nose when she took it out.
"Why not?" she said. "All artistic activity is a sort of celestial disease, and its antidote is bodily activity which is a material disease. A perfectly healthy body, like mine, does not need exercise, except in order to bring down the temperature of the celestial fever. When I am playing golf, my artisticsoul goes to sleep and rests. And when I am composing, I should not know a golf-ball from an egg. That is me. You might think I am being egoistic, but I only take myself as an instance of a type. I speak for the whole corporate body of artists."
"Militant here on earth," remarked Dodo.
"Militant? Of course all artists are militant, and they fight against blind eyes and deaf ears. They scream and lighten, and hope to shake this dull world into perception. But it is fighting against prodigious odds. The drama that seems to interest the world now is a presentation of the hopeless lives of suburban people. Any note of romance or distinction is sufficient to secure a failure. It's the same in music: Debussy when he tells us of rain in the garden makes the rain fall into a small backyard with sooty blighted plants growing in it, out of a foggy sky. When he gives us 'reflets dans l'eau' the water is a little cement basin in the same backyard, with anemic goldfish swimming about in it. As for Strauss, he began and finished with that terrible 'domestic symphony.' It went from the kitchen into the scullery, and back again. Fiction is the same. Any book that deals with entirely dull people, provided that they, none of them, ever show a spark of real fire or are touched by romance or joy or beauty, makes success. They must have the smell of oilcloth and Irish stew around them, and then the world says, 'This is art' or 'This is reality.' There's the mistake! Art is never real: it is fantasy, a fairy-story, a soap-bubble sailing into the sunset. It is Art because ittakes you out of reality. Of course artists are militant; they fight against dullness, and they will fight forever, and they will never win. As for their being militant here on earth, you must be militant somewhere. I shall be militant in heaven by and by. I wonder if you understand. As I said, I was disappointed in Nadine artistically, but I am enraptured with her humanly. On that same plane I am enraptured with you, Dodo. Humanly speaking, I have watched you with sobs in my throat, battling perilously on the great seas. And now you are like a battered ship, having weathered all storms, and putting into port, with all the piers and quays shouting congratulation. Artistically speaking, you are a derelict, and I should like to have you blown up. Hullo, what has happened to Dr. Cardew?"
Dodo looked quickly round. The thought just crossed her mind that he might be asleep or having a fit. But there was no Dr. Cardew there, nor anywhere about, to be seen.
"He has gone away while we weren't attending, just as a conjurer changes a rabbit to an omelette while you aren't attending," she said, "and I'm sure I don't wonder. Oh, Edith, at last the 'Hunting of the Snark' has come true. I see now that we areBoojums. People softly and silently vanish away when you and I are talking, poor dears. They can't stand it, and I've noticed it before. Dear old Chesterford used to vanish sometimes like that, and I never knew until I saw he wasn't there. I'm sure Bertie vanishes too sometimes. I suppose we ought tovanish also, as the table must be laid again for dinner to-night."
Edith finished her beer.
"I had breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same cloth once," she said. "I was composing all day, and at intervals things were stuck in front of me while I ate or drank. I didn't move from nine in the morning till half-past eight in the evening, and I wrote forty pages of full score, and the inspiration never flagged for a moment. I wonder why artists are so fond of writing what they call 'My Memories'; they ought to be content, as I am, to stand or fall by what they have done. Thank God, I have never had any doubts about my standing. Oh, I see a telegraph-boy coming up the drive. It is sure to be for me. I am expecting a quantity."
This particular one happened to be for Dodo. Edith was disposed to take it as a personal insult.
Nadine during the days she had spent at Winston had not done much looking after Papa Jack, which had been the face-reason of her going there; and it is doubtful whether the real reason had found itself fulfilled, since there was substituted for the strain of seeing Hugh daily, the strain of wanting to see him. Dodo, with her own swift recuperative powers, and the genius she had for being absorbed in her immediate surroundings, had not reckoned with Nadine's inferior facility in this respect, nor had she realized how completely the love which had at last touched Nadine drained and dominated her whole nature.All her zest for living, all her sensitiveness and intelligence seemed to have been, as by some alchemical touch, transformed into the gold which, all her life, had been missing from her. She explained this to Esther, who, with an open-mindedness that might have appeared rather unsisterly, ranged her sympathies in opposition to Seymour.
"How long I shall be able to stop here," she said, "I don't know. I promised Mama I would go away for at least a week, unless Hughie wanted me, but after that I think I shall go back whether he wants me or not. I can't attend to anything else, and last night when I was playing billiards I carefully put the chalk into my coffee, which is not at all the sort of thing I usually do. It is very odd: all my life I have been quite unaware of this one thing, now I am not really aware of anything else. You are rather dream-like yourself to me: I am not quite sure if you have really happened, or are part of a general background."
"I am not part of any background," said Esther firmly.
"No, so you say; but perhaps it is only the background that tells me so. And I suppose I ought to think a great deal about Seymour. I try to do that, but when I've thought about him for about a minute and a quarter, I find my thoughts wander, and I wonder if Hughie has had his beef-tea or not. I do hope that he is not unhappy, but having hoped it, I have finished with that, and remember that just at this moment Hughie is being made comfortable for the night.But do pin me down to Seymour. Did you see him in town, and does he mean to tell me what he thinks?"
"Yes, I saw him. He was exceedingly cross, but I don't think his crossness came from temper; it came from his mind's hurting him. He told me he had meant to come down here and have it out with you, but presently he said you weren't worth it. So I took your side."
"That was darling of you," said Nadine; "but I am not sure that Seymour is not right."
"How can he be right? You haven't changed towards him."
"Oh, doesn't jilting him make a change?" asked Nadine hopefully.
"No, that is an accident, as I told him. You didn't do it on purpose. You might as well say that to be knocked down by a motor-car is done on purpose. You get knocked down by Hughie. You hadn't ever loved Seymour at all, and really you said you would marry him largely because you wanted Hughie to stop thinking about you. It was chiefly for Hughie's sake you said you would marry Seymour, and it was so wonderful of you. Then came another accident and Seymour fell in love with you. I warned him when we were on the family improvement tour in the summer that he was doing rather a risky thing—"
Nadine got up.
"Risky?" she said. "Oh, how risky it is. It is that which makes it so splendid! You risk everything:you go for it blind. Do you think Seymour went for it blind? I don't believe he did. I think he had one eye open all the time. He couldn't be quite blind I think: his intelligence would prevent it. And I don't think he would be cross now, if he had been quite blind. So I am not properly sorry for him."
"I went to lunch with him," said Esther. "He ate an enormous lunch, which I suppose is a consoling sign. But then Seymour would eat an enormous breakfast on the morning he was going to be hung. He would feel that he would never have any more breakfasts, so he would eat one that would last forever. I think we have given enough time to Seymour. It is much more important that you shouldn't think of me as a background."
Nadine apparently thought differently.
"But I want to be nice to Seymour," she said, "and I don't see how to begin. And—and he's part of the background, too. He doesn't seem really to matter. But if he was really fond of me, like that, it's hateful of me not to care. But how can I care? I've tried to care every day, and often twice a day, but—oh, a huge 'but.'"
The two were talking in Dodo's sitting-room, which Nadine had very wisely appropriated. At this moment the door opened, and Seymour stood there.
"I made up my mind not to come and see you," he said to Nadine, "and then I changed it."
Esther sprang up.
"Oh, Seymour, how mean of you," she said, "not to ask Nadine if you might come."
"Not at all. She was bound to see me. But I didn't come to see you. You had better go away."
"If Nadine wishes—" she began.
"It does not matter what Nadine wishes. Nadine, please tell her to go."
Seymour spoke quite quietly, and having spoken he turned aside and lit a cigarette he held in his hand. By the time he had finished doing that the door had closed behind Esther. He looked round.
"What a charming room!" he said. "But if you are going to sit in a room like this, you ought to dress for it."
Nadine felt that all the sorrow she had been conscious of for him was being squeezed out of her. He tiptoed about, now looking at a picture, and now fingering an embroidery. He stopped for a moment opposite a Louis Seize tapestry chair, and gently flicked off it the cigarette ash that he had let drop there. He looked at the faded crimson of the Spanish silk on the walls, and examined with extreme care a Dutch picture of a frozen canal with peasants skating, that hung above the mantelpiece. There was an Aubonne carpet on the floor, and after one glance at it he went 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 thedust-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 atu 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 andtouched 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 hashad 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."